Longlisted for The Baillie Gifford Prize 2024

Prospect Magazine Books of the Year 2024: Lives

Guardian Best Biographies & Memoirs 2024

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique, a French colony, in 1925. As a young man, he volunteered to fight in de Gaulle's army for the liberation of France, and trained to become a doctor and psychiatrist. His experiences as a Black man under French colonial rule had a profound effect on him. In 1952, he wrote Black Skin, White Masks, a vital analysis of the effects of racism on the human psyche.

He was later re-assigned to a hospital in French Algeria. It was here that he became involved in the rebellion of the National Liberation Front (FLN), who fought to break free from colonial power. Fanon's work for the FLN as a propagandist and psychiatrist became highly contentious. His final work, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in 1961 just before he died at the age of 36. It has proved to be one of the most controversial yet influential books of our time.

The Rebel's Clinic is a searing biography of the short and harrowing life of Frantz Fanon, and a brilliant, nuanced exploration of his ideas, whose legacy is still so powerful. In an age when debates about race and the effects of colonialism are ever more urgent, The Rebel's Clinic is a profoundly relevant book.

Autorentext
Adam Shatz is the US Editor of the London Review of Books, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. He also hosts the podcast Myself With Others, which explores the life of ideas and features guests within the arts, culture and literature. Shatz studied history at Columbia University, has been a visiting professor at Bard College and New York University, and a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.

Klappentext

A searing biography of the life and legacy of Frantz Fanon, a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher whose work has been influential in post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism.