Books about Sandeep from Amazon.com

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem. .
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A great memoirist can burnish even an ordinary childhood into something bright--see, for instance, Annie Dillard's An American Childhood. So what about a really good writer with access to a dramatic and little-documented story? This is the case with Catfish and Mandala, Vietnamese American Andrew X. Pham's captivating first book, which delves fearlessly into questions of home, family, and identity. The son of Vietnamese parents who suffered terribly during the Vietnam War and brought their family to America when he was 10, Pham, on the cusp of his 30s, defied his parents' conservative hopes for him and his engineering career by becoming a poorly paid freelance writer. After the suicide of his sister, he set off on an even riskier path to travel some of the world on his bicycle. In the grueling, enlightening year that followed, he pedaled through Mexico, the American West Coast, Japan, and finally his far-off first land, Vietnam.

The story, with some of a mandala's repeated symbolic motifs, works on several levels at once. It is an exploration into the meaning of home, a descriptive travelogue, and an intimate look at the Vietnamese immigrant experience. There are beautifully illuminated flashbacks to the experience of fleeing Vietnam and to an earlier, more innocent childhood. While Pham's stern father, a survivor of Vietcong death camps, regrets that Pham has not been a respectful Vietnamese son, he also reveals that he wishes he himself had been more "American" for his kids, that he had "taken [them] camping." Catfish and Mandala is a book of double-edged truths, and it would make a fascinating study even in less able hands. In those of the adventurous, unsentimental Pham, it is an irresistible story. --Maria Dolan.
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In a second edition of their successful Concise History of Modern India, Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf explore India's modern history afresh and update the events of the last decade. These include the takeover of Congress from the seemingly entrenched Hindu nationalist party in 2004, India's huge advances in technology and the country's new role as a major player in world affairs. From the days of the Mughals, through the British Empire, and into Independence, the country has been transformed by its institutional structures. It is these institutions which have helped bring about the social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place over the last half century and paved the way for the modern success story. Despite these advances, poverty, social inequality and religious division still fester. In response to these dilemmas, the book grapples with questions of caste and religious identity, and the nature of the Indian nation..
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-- Wendy Doniger, University of Chcago

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This traditional-scale lab book prepares readers to perform the fundamental operations of organic chemistry in the laboratory and apply the operations intelligently in new situations -- to think and act like an organic chemist. Features traditional-scale laboratory procedures which do not require expensive, special glassware and which provide enough material for visual and physical characterization. Contains 115 experiments -- 12 experiments that teach basic operations, 46 experiments that reinforce concepts, and 47 minilabs (shorter experiments that can be used to fill partial or shorter lab periods). Features many experiments that use common or household compounds. Provides a section on qualitative organic analysis. Includes sections on using the chemical literature, keeping a notebook, and planning a synthesis. For anyone interested in organic chemistry.

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ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, 11th Edition, boasts an unparalleled coverage of sustainability, basic science, and bias-free comparisons, within a flexible chapter organization and supported by the strongest media tools and illustration program available. New media to this edition includes: "How Would You Vote?" found at http://biology.brookscole.com/miller11. This is an application of 68 provocative environmental issues covered in the text. Students investigate the issues in a structured manner, and then cast their votes on the Web where the results are tallied; Environmental ScienceNow, a learning tool that helps students assess their study needs through pretests, post-test, personalized learning plans and "How Do I Prepare," which aides students in basic math, chemistry and graphing review; and InfoTrac College Edition, a library of full text articles; PowerLecture for Miller's Environmental Science, 11th Edition. This one-stop PowerPoint Tool contains robust, preloaded PowerPoint lecture images organized by every chapter. PowerLecture contains: animations that bring key topics and concepts to life; a slide-sorting view for each chapter that lets you select, copy and paste slides into your PowerPoint lecture; the ability to select a piece of a figure and enlarge it; labels in text boxes that you can edit, remove, or present one label at a time; quick access to animations and videos--if a PowerPoint slide contains a green button, just click on it to show a related animation; Instructor's Manual and associated chapter outlines; and Test Bank--a complete electronic file of test items..
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