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

447pp., illus., paperback, Reprint London, (2024) 2025

ISBN: 9781035900053

First published in the USA in 2024.

Winner of the 2024 American Library in Paris Book Award.

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 goes beyond crass simplifications of both Fanon and his legacy and gives us back the man in full: political radical, expansive humanist, philosophical existentialist, practising psychiatrist, freedom fighter, father, husband, son. Fanon did more with his 36 years than most of us could manage in three lifetimes. An extraordinary book about an extraordinary man." Zadie Smith, author of The Fraud

"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.