Review by Booklist Review
Shatz's thoroughly researched biography of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist turned revolutionary intellectual and activist, focuses on a complex man who lived a brief but adventurous life and left a significant legacy. A humanist to his core, Fanon was kinetic during and after WWII. Born in Martinique, he fought with the French against the Nazis. He later joined the FLN (Front de libération nationale) to fight for Algerian independence from France. His books, including Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, continue to have a profound impact on freedom and antiracist movements. Strongly influenced by the existentialist works of Sartre, whom he later befriended, Fanon's work and its resonance have been compared to that of James Baldwin. Fanon's work was crucial for some Black Panthers, and he influenced the thoughts and writings of Edward Said. Shatz's revealing portrait arrives at a crucial time as issues of race, cultural identity, immigration, human rights, and inequity are daily news around the world and as Europe and the U.S. struggle to confront the ghosts of their violent pasts. 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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this perceptive biography, Shatz (Writers and Missionaries), the U.S. editor of the London Review of Books, chronicles the life of psychiatrist and political theorist Frantz Fanon (1925--1961), covering his childhood in French colonial Martinique, service in the Free French Forces during WWII, disillusionment with the "myth of French color blindness" while studying medicine in Lyon, and immersion in the 1950s Algerian independence movement. Elucidating the ideas and figures that animated Fanon's thinking, Shatz discusses the theorist's skepticism of the negritude movement, his work on a Marxist "collective approach to care" at the Saint-Alban asylum, and the influence existentialist Jean-Paul Sarte's Anti-Semite and Jew had on Fanon's understanding of racism. The nuanced narrative skillfully illuminates how the disparate threads of Fanon's life fit together, as when Shatz suggests that Fanon's commitment to providing psychiatric patients with a "sense of selfhood and dignity" while practicing in Algeria led him to embrace the country's independence movement. Shatz also provides discerning commentary on Fanon's two masterworks (Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth), contending that the latter's endorsement of violence's redemptive power was "at odds with his findings as a doctor" to Algerian patients suffering from "hallucinations and muscular rigidity, suicidal and murderous urges, depression, and apathy" after battling French forces. The result is a striking appraisal of a towering thinker. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A closely argued study of the life and work of the iconic leftist thinker. Like Albert Camus, a near contemporary, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) took a nuanced view of revolutionary struggles in colonial nations. Born in Martinique, a French colony, Fanon grew up in comparatively comfortable surroundings as a son of middle-class parents. After serving with distinction during World War II, Fanon studied philosophy and psychiatry in France. Afterward, writes Shatz, U.S. editor of the London Review of Books, he developed critically important insights into the psychology of the oppressed. At the same time, Fanon worked with French soldiers who had tortured civilians during the long colonial war in Algeria, finding the same complex of maladies: "What they shared was an invisible, lacerating anguish inscribed in the psyche, immobilizing both body and soul." Fanon was definitively on the side of the Algerians, idealizing their revolution but overlooking in the death of colonialism the emergence of an Islamist society that "ensured the dominance of religious populism." He was similarly disheartened by the dominance of strongman governments in newly independent African colonies, even as he argued that Europe's time was over, while "an Africa to come" was emerging from the colonial shadows. In books such as The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon furthered his anticolonial opposition to both Europe and the U.S., the latter of which provided him treatment for the cancer that would kill him, treatment that was ironically courtesy of none other than the CIA. The author effectively shows how Fanon is far more influential now than he was during his life, and not without some irony there, too: Exponents of so-called replacement theory, for instance, trace their movement to "Fanon's observations about the desire of the colonized to take the place of their colonizers." A useful, readable adjunct to anyone studying Fanon's life and work. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
