Book Talk: Trymaine Lee — A Thousand Ways to Die - with Yamiche Alcindor

Watch authorTrymaine Lee's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him--the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the also insidious racism of the North, and gun violence that stole the lives of two great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins.

In this powerful narrative, Lee weaves together three strands: the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; his work as a chronicler of gun violence, tallying the costs and riches generated by both the legal and illegal gun industries; and his own life story. With unflinching honesty he takes readers on a journey, from almost being caught up in gun violence as a young man, to tracing the legacy of the Middle Passage in Ghana through his ancestors' footsteps, to confronting the challenges of representing his people in an overwhelmingly white and often hostile media world, and most importantly, to celebrating the enduring strength of his family and community.

In A Thousand Ways to Die, Lee answers Nola and all who seek a more just America. He shares the hard truths and complexities of the Black experience, but he also celebrates the beauty and resilience that is Nola's legacy.

Trymaine Lee is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy award winning journalist and MSNBC contributor. He’s the host of the “Into America” podcast where he covers the intersection of Blackness, power, and politics. A contributing author to the “1619 Project”, he has reported for The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. A Thousand Ways to Die is his first book.

Lee is in conversation with Yamiche Alcindor, a White House Correspondent for NBC News, covering the second administration of President Trump. She previously served as an NBC Washington Correspondent, covering former President Biden’s administration and former Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign. She was previously the moderator of Washington Week on PBS and the PBS NewsHour White House Correspondent and won a Peabody Award for her coverage of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Yamiche was previously a national political reporter for The New York Times and a national breaking news reporter for USA Today. Yamiche earned a master's degree in broadcast news and documentary filmmaking from New York University and a bachelor's in English, government and African American studies from Georgetown University. A Miami native, Yamiche is married to a fellow journalist and is the daughter of Haitian immigrants.

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