There is a great deal more than Madness lurking within the Division 1 NCAA Basketball Tournament. There are equally strong traditions, symmetries, and even normalities that also define this annual rite of passage. And one of the most powerful of those is the perennial dominance displayed by college basketball's "Blue Bloods." These seven programs, each of which has won at least four NCAA titles, have collectively harvested 44 of the 84 championship trophies awarded since the inauguration of the tournament in 1939. In Blue Bloods: The Seven Greatest College Basketball Programs of All Time, Mark Mehler and Jeff Tiberii take a close look at those magnificent seven—Kentucky, Kansas, UCLA, North Carolina, Duke, Indiana, and the University of Connecticut—examining how they have managed over multiple decades to establish themselves as American basketball royalty. While there are many commonalities among them— legendary coaches, heroic players, fanatical fan bases, etc.—that help explain much of their success, each program has traveled its own unique path to glory, complete with plenty of deep lows offsetting the dizzying highs. In addition, Blue Bloods examines several additional basketball programs including Michigan State and Villanova which have likewise made indelible marks over many years, but fall just shy of blue blood status. Call them the "light-blue bloods." All the history, ultimately leading to the fulfillment of generations of hoop dreams, comes alive in these pages.

Adult Protective Services (APS) is the social service system charged with aiding older people and disabled adults who are being mistreated by others or cannot meet their own basic needs for health and safety (self-neglect). These are America's most vulnerable citizens, and they often suffer for years, while remaining largely invisible to the greater world. Written from the inside of APS, Mark Mehler's memoir of his seven years as a crisis case manager reveals a world that very few people see, and addresses why and how people do this work, what they take away from it and the price that they pay to do it. Ranging from horrifying to uplifting and bizarrely funny, the stories recounted here witness human frailty and disaster, and the efforts of some dedicated caseworkers to stem that tide.