Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tremaine Lee has spent his career chronicling the daily toll of violence and inequality.

In his new book, the MSNBC contributor blends deeply reported journalism with personal narrative to show how racism, trauma, and violence cut lives short and how families can carry that loss across generations.

I recently spoke with him about the book,

A Thousand Ways to Die, the True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America.

Tremaine Lee, it's great to see you.

Likewise, thanks for having me.

Of course.

You begin this book in a deeply personal place,

your own heart attack at the age of 38.

Why decide to start there and really frame this

narrative through your own brush with mortality? Before the heart attack, which was seven years ago

this summer in July, I was writing a book about the true cost of gun violence in terms of actual

dollars as a way to speak to the broad cost that families and communities touched by gun violence pay

every single day. But that day when I had my own brush with death with that heart attack,

it really began a journey to really widen the aperture on what violence really is. And so

I describe in the book, you know, a blood clot and a bullet are very different things, but both

have the ability to take,

twist, and shred a life. And both come from these impulses, these very American impulses,

in the way we've experienced trauma and the way we continue to carry it, especially the way

violence manifests in our bodies.

On that point, I mean, you also write about your uncle's murder and the long shadow it cast

over your family. How did that loss

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