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

Named a most anticipated book of 2024 by Foreign Policy Lit Hub The Millions

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

Author: Adam Shatz
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 01/23/2024
Pages: 464
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.39lbs
Size: 9.26h x 6.20w x 1.19d
ISBN: 9780374176426


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 08/01/2023 pg. 17
Publishers Weekly 10/30/2023
Booklist 11/01/2023 pg. 6
Kirkus Reviews 11/15/2023

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.