In the last decade millions of dollars have been spent on restoring and revitalizing the Los Angeles River and its surroundings. Dozens of parks, miles of bike trails, public art installations and hundreds of trees and plants follow the river as it winds 51 miles through more than 100 communities. Down by the Los Angeles River is the first on-the-ground guide to checking out sites new and old, and getting to know the historic river that runs through greater L.A. The book includes striking original illustrations as well as maps. Twenty-seven walks and twelve bike rides along the Los Angeles and its tributaries, each with directions to the starting point and descriptions of natural, historic, and artistic features along the way. The river paths are already popular for walkers and joggers, bicyclists, dog-walkers, historians and bird-watchers—a readymade audience for this one-of-a-kind book.

America is in the midst of a rental housing affordability crisis. More than a quarter of those that rent their homes spend more than half of their income for housing, even as city leaders across the United States have been busily dismantling the nation's urban public housing projects. In After the Projects, Lawrence Vale investigates the deeply-rooted spatial politics of public housing development and redevelopment at a time when lower-income Americans face a desperate struggle to find affordable rental housing in many cities. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with public housing residents, real estate developers, and community leaders, Vale analyzes the different ways in which four major American cities implemented the federal government's HOPE VI program for public housing transformation, while also providing a national picture of this program. Some cities attempted to minimize the presence of the poorest residents in their new mixed-income communities, but other cities tried to serve as many low-income households as possible. Through examining the social, political, and economic forces that underlie housing displacement, Vale develops the novel concept of governance constellations. He shows how the stars align differently in each city, depending on community pressures that have evolved in response to each city's past struggles with urban renewal. This allows disparate key players to gain prominence when implementing HOPE VI redevelopment. A much-needed comparative approach to the existing research on public housing, After the Projects shines a light on the broad variety of attitudes towards public housing redevelopment in American cities and identifies ways to achieve more equitable processes and outcomes for low-income Americans.

An informative, anecdotal history of classic American cocktails pays tribute to Jerry Thomas, the father of the American bar, in a study that includes a host of mixology lore, legends, trivia, and more than one hundred recipes for punches, cocktails, sours, fizzes, toddies, slings, and other drinks.

Rapid, inexpensive, and easy-to-deploy, near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy can be used to analyze samples of virtually any composition, origin, and condition. The Handbook of Near Infrared Analysis, Fourth Edition, explores the factors necessary to perform accurate and time- and cost-effective analyses across a growing spectrum of disciplines. This updated and expanded edition incorporates the latest advances in instrumentation, computerization, chemometrics applied to NIR spectroscopy, and method development in NIR spectroscopy, and underscores current trends in sample preparation, calibration transfer, process control, data analysis, instrument performance testing, and commercial NIR instrumentation. This work offers readers an unparalleled combination of theoretical foundations, cutting-edge applications, and practical experience. Additional features include the following: Explains how to perform accurate as well as time- and cost-effective analyses. Reviews software-enabled chemometric methods and other trends in data analysis. Highlights novel applications in pharmaceuticals, polymers, plastics, petrochemicals, textiles, foods and beverages, baked products, agricultural products, biomedicine, nutraceuticals, and counterfeit detection. Underscores current trends in sample preparation, calibration transfer, process control, data analysis, and multiple aspects of commercial NIR instrumentation. Offering the most complete single-source guide of its kind, the Handbook of Near Infrared Analysis, Fourth Edition, continues to offer practicing chemists and spectroscopists an unparalleled combination of theoretical foundations, cutting-edge applications, and detailed practical experience provided firsthand by more than 50 experts in the field.