THE REBEL'S CLINIC, the revolutionary lives of Frantz Fanon

451pp., illus., hardback, d.w., First UK Edition, London, 2024

First published in the USA in 2024.

Biography of psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). Born in Martinique, he studied medicine in France, specializing in psychiatry. Sent to work in a hospital in Algeria, he later joined the Algerian Nationalist Movement. He is the author of Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

"... not only a superb addition to a large and largely hagiographic literature; it is also a contribution to one of the greater theoretical challenges we face today: Is it possible to create a genuinely universalist political ethic that avoids the pitfalls of earlier ones? ... Without clichés, strained metaphors, or false starts, Shatz’s flowing prose makes the radicality of Fanon’s claims look like common sense" Susan Neiman, The New York Review of Books

"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

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.