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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. When Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tremaine Lee was 38, his body gave out.

He suffered a sudden heart attack, a moment that forced him to stop and confront what he'd been carrying for years.

Lee had reported on lives cut short by America's gun violence epidemic,

and in facing his own mortality, he realized the toll those

stories had taken on his own body. His new memoir, A Thousand Ways to Die, is part history,

part reporting, and part personal turning point. The book reads like a plea for people to see

the humanity of those lost to gun violence, and for this country to finally care enough to act.

Lee takes us into communities like New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Chicago, where he spent years documenting gun violence and its ripple effects.

He traces the bloody history and relationships black Americans have with firearms and recalls

the near misses in his own youth, also following his ancestors' path back to Ghana to the legacy

of the Middle Passage. Lee and his colleagues won the Pulitzer Prize for the Times-Picayune's

coverage of Hurricane Katrina. He's also an Emmy-winning journalist, a contributor to MSNBC,

and is written for the New York Times and Huff Post. Tremaine Lee, welcome to fresh air.

Tanya, thank you so much for having me.

So you start this book with this vivid description of the day you almost died, and it's the summer of 2017. You're at home with

your wife and your six-year-old daughter, Nola. And kids that age, they asked oftentimes profound

questions. And her questions made you consider things you had never faced before, like the weight

of witnessing so much death as a reporter.

Yeah.

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