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Book Cover for: The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Adam Shatz

The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

Adam Shatz

Reader Score

84%

84% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Great

Based on 14 reviews on

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Longlist:Baillie Gifford Prize -Nonfiction (2024)

One of The New York Times' best books of 2024 so far

Named a best book of 2024 by The New Yorker and Vulture

Longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

"Nimble and engrossing . . . [An] exemplary work of public intellectualism." --Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

"Undoubtedly the best [biography of Fanon] . . . A remarkable achievement." --Robert J. C. Young, Los Angeles Review of Books

A revelatory biography of the writer-activist who inspired today's movements for social and racial justice.

In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon's shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon's stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of "dis-alienation" in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital.

Today, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin's essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel's Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon's extraordinary life--and a guide to the books that underlie today's most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.

Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs

Book Details

  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publish Date: Jan 23rd, 2024
  • Pages: 464
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.10in - 6.30in - 1.70in - 1.41lb
  • EAN: 9780374176426
  • Categories: PhilosophersAfrican American & BlackCivil Rights

About the Author

Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is the author of Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and the host of the podcast Myself with Others. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"[A] perceptive biography . . . Elucidating the ideas and figures that animated Fanon's thinking, [. . .] the nuanced narrative skillfully illuminates how the disparate threads of Fanon's life fit together . . . Shatz also provides discerning commentary on Fanon's two masterworks . . . A striking appraisal of a towering thinker." --Publishers Weekly

"[A] thoroughly researched biography . . . The Rebel's Clinic is a deep meditation on the transformative power and influence of one radical philosophical writer on the continuing fight for justice on many fronts." --Booklist (starred review)

"The Rebel's Clinic is a diligent, scrupulous, serious book. Adam Shatz keeps Fanon alive as one of us--a human being--not simply the larger-than-life subject of an academic study. This book offers a careful reconstruction of Fanon's times, especially the war in Algeria, and resonates at a moment when we are tragically no closer to solving the problems Fanon dedicated his life and writing to understanding." --John Edgar Wideman, author of Fanon and Look for Me and I'll Be Gone

"Frantz Fanon has found his Isaac Deutscher in Adam Shatz. Politically and psychologically suave, The Rebel's Clinic is as illuminating on the tragic pattern of Fanon's private life as on the tumultuous continents through which he moved. It is also continuously insightful about Fanon's tormentingly complicated intellectual bequest on the crucial subjects of race and empire." --Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide and From the Ruins of Empire

"Adam Shatz offers a richly detailed account of the life and thought of Frantz Fanon. It is at once an intimate and unsparing portrait of the complexities of Fanon's life as psychiatrist and militant political activist, and a vivid depiction of the anti-colonial struggles in which he engaged. We get a close look at internal conflicts among revolutionaries, as Fanon makes his way from Martinique to Algeria to sub-Saharan Africa. Shatz's masterful command of the history of that moment of promise in the early 1960s is compelling, indeed gripping reading. This is a book that gives deep insight not only into the life and times of Fanon, but also into the ways in which the history he lived was made." --Joan W. Scott, professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study

"The Rebel's Clinic is a triumph, a sweeping work of intellectual history that is also an intimate biography of a remarkable thinker and historical figure. It is beautifully written, deftly constructed, rigorous and illuminating. This is a book that will last and be read for many years." --Eyal Press, author of Dirty Work

"The Rebel's Clinic is a fabulous book. Frantz Fanon's life as portrayed by Adam Shatz is a breathtaking love and jealousy ridden encounter with philosophy, politics, and literature, taking place in the last days of European empires." --Ivan Krastev, author of Is It Tomorrow Yet? and co-author of The Light that Failed

"Adam Shatz has captured Fanon's evolution as a thinker by linking this proud, fastidious man's interiority to a complex network of contexts: family, war, art, psychiatry, existentialism, black America, left-wing Catholicism and, most of all, African poetics. The result is the most subtle, comprehensive and lucid study yet to appear in English.Shatz has the gift of explanation without simplification." --Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland

"More than a biography, Adam Shatz's The Rebel's Clinic is a rich and textured portrait of the intellectual and political worlds that shaped Frantz Fanon's life, ideas, and legacies. Readers who know Fanon's work intimately as well as those just discovering this iconic figure of Third World revolution will learn from this book." --Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

"Adam Shatz sweeps us up in Frantz Fanon's life-as-road movie, with a cast of characters and an array of settings that come alive on the page, from Sartre and Beauvoir in Copacabana to Patrice Lumumba in the suburbs of Léopoldville. At the same time, with his unequaled mastery of geopolitics and world-spanning ideas, he has given us an intellectual history of a century of revolutionary aspirations. The Rebel's Clinic is a what is to be done for our times." --Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator and Looking for The Stranger

"The Rebel's Clinic is a fascinating and enlightening read, one that will speak to many and that will help correct misconceptions about Fanon. This book not only provides a full picture of its subject; it also inspires the reader to apply Fanon's insights to situations that transcend his life and times. Adam Shatz has written an important book that speaks to our troubled and confusing moment." --Raja Shehadeh, Orwell Prize-winning author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I