When he was growing up in southwest Baker County, Georgia, Karl E. Peace realized early in life that he would have to provide the strength and commitment needed to make a better life for himself and his family. The author traces his humble beginnings on a series of tenant farms as his family struggled to survive as sharecroppers during the 1940s and 1950s. The son of parents that between them had five years of formal schooling, he relied greatly on the inspiration he received from a loving mother and his own determination and extraordinary intellect to become the first from rural Baker County to earn a Ph.D. During careers as an educator and a pharmaceutical company executive in the areas of drug research and development, he accumulated considerable wealth that he used through philanthropic endeavors to help many other individuals attain their goals in education and to the benefit of mankind. Paid In Full is much more than a memoir from rags to riches; it is a story of devotion, inspiration, love and loss, and the personal treasure within the heart that one accumulates from helping others.

Statesboro, GA - When he was a child on a tenant farm in southwest Georgia, Karl E. Peace learned early that his parents, thankfully, were not equal in temperament or ambition. While his mother was protective and had a strong desire to learn, his father subjected him to brutal beatings and would have relegated him to a continuing cycle of sharecropping and poverty.

While his father rejected him when he was child, his mother provided the love and inspiration that he needed to endure and persevere. With a small loan from a prominent farmer and businessman, he left Baker County in 1959, the first in his family to receive a high school diploma, and continued his education at Georgia Southern College in Statesboro, Ga. After earning degrees from Georgia Southern and Clemson University, he returned to Baker County and moved his mother, then suffering from breast cancer, and his siblings to Statesboro to begin life anew.

In Paid In Full the author paints a vivid picture of life on Georgia's tenant farms in the 1950s - perhaps one of few books with a first-hand account of the involvement of poor whites in the state's old sharecropping culture. The book is also a tribute to a mother's love and a son's devotion as well as an account of a love story that ended tragically with the death of the love of his life.

After his wife lost a gallant battle to breast cancer in 2004, Dr. Peace, who holds a Ph.D. in biostatistics, endowed the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University in honor and memory of his late wife. He remains a benefactor to many young men and women seeking to improve their lives through advanced education, and he has generously recognized the positive contributions that others have made to his own life.

Here is what Dr. James Hotz, author of Where Remedies Lie and recognized as the inspiration for the book Doc Hollywood, had to say about Paid In Full:

"Paid In Full is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry. This is an insider's view of one of the most powerful and productive segments of the world's economy. Karl Peace is a mathematical genius who applied his unique skills to develop statistical models that helped revolutionize the drug development

process.

"Along the way Karl made a fortune, but when his wife was tragically dying of breast cancer, he committed his life to philanthropy, trying to use his drug earnings to advance public health. Karl's success story is infinitely more compelling because societal norms dictate that it should have never happened.

"I have practiced community medicine for nearly 30 years in the tiny rural county of his birth. Baker County has only 4,000 citizens, is one of the nation's poorest and most rural counties, and Karl's family was at the bottom of the heap. Neither parent finished grade school. His father was an abusive sharecropper. Somehow fate determined genius would be born to this family in a one room shack without running water, electricity or even screens on the windows. Nurtured by an endless supply of maternal love, a teacher who recognized his spark of genius and an indomitable will, Karl beat the odds to become one of America's 'Best and Brightest.'

"Hollywood has never made this movie as no one would believe it could happen in real life! I had to see it with my own eyes and now you can also. Yes, the American Dream can still happen...Paid In Full describes how."

For more information about Paid In full or Dr. Karl E. Peace, please contact Mitchell Peace at 912- 739-4751 or via email: mpeace@aol.com. Orders for Paid In Full are currently accepted on the Internet at: http://www.plowboy press.com. Proceeds from the sale of this book go to fund programs of the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University.