Keeping it Real: A Six-Principle Approach to Something Different

by Edward Ball

There are 6 basic criteria I outline in this book that have to be in place before a person can be real and ultimately keep it real. I believe that personifying these principles will lead to success in all walks of life. For those who are making transitions in life like going from a high school kid to preparing for college or people transitioning from thug to gentleman, or prisoner to citizen, recognizing and adhering to these principles is key to making that conversion successful.

104 pages, Paperback

First published June 13, 2015

About the author

Edward Ball was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1958, grew up in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. He finished high school in New Orleans and attended Brown University, graduating in 1982 with a B.A. in Semiotics.

He received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1984, and afterwards moved to New York City, where he worked as a freelance art critic, writing about film, art, architecture, and books for several magazines. For several years, he wrote for The Village Voice, a weekly with a circulation of 450,000.

In 1993, he began to research his family legacy as slave owners in South Carolina, an investigation that resulted in a half-hour National Public Radio documentary, "The Other History," which was awarded, in 1994, Best Radio Feature by the Society of Professional Journalists. He looked deeper into his family's story, documented in several archives, and, after three years, published his first book, Slaves in the Family, about his family's plantations and his search for black Americans whose ancestors the writer's family had once enslaved. Slaves in the Family was a New York Times bestseller and won the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Edward Ball's other books comprise biography, history, and memoir. He has taught at Yale University, and he lives in New Haven, Connecticut.