PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
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, and 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.
[The Rebel's Clinic] keeps Fanon a live person most of the time — Fanon as one of us, very human, not simply the larger-than-life subject of an academic study [...] tragically ,we are no closer now to solving the issues Fanon dedicated his life and writing to understanding * John Edgar Wideman, author of Fanon and Look for Me and I'll Be Gone * Adam Shatz offers a richly detailed account of the life and thought of Frantz Fanon. It is at once an intimate and unsparing portrait of the complexities of Fanon’s life as psychiatrist and militant political activist, and a vivid depiction of the anti-colonial struggles in which he engaged. We get a close look at internal conflicts among revolutionaries, as Fanon makes his way from Martinique to Algeria to Africa. Shatz’s masterful command of the history of that moment of promise in the early 1960s is compelling, indeed gripping reading. This is a book that gives deep insight not only into the life and times of Fanon, but also into the ways in which the history he lived was made. * Joan W. Scott, professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study * More than a biography, Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic is a rich and textured portrait of the intellectual and political worlds that shaped Frantz Fanon’s life, ideas, and legacies. Readers who know Fanon’s work intimately as well as those just discovering this iconic figure of Third World revolution will learn from this book. * Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination * The Rebel's Clinic is a fascinating and enlightening read, one that will speak to many and that will help correct misconceptions about Fanon. This book not only provides a full picture of its subject; it also inspires the reader to apply Fanon's insights to situations that transcend his life and times. Adam Shatz has written an important book that speaks to our troubled and confusing moment. * Raja Shehadeh, Orwell Prize–winning author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I * Adam Shatz sweeps us up in Franz Fanon's life-as-road movie, with a cast of characters and an array of settings that come alive on the page, from Sartre and Beauvoir in Copacabana to Patrice Lumumba in the suburbs of Léopoldville. At the same time, with his mastery of geopolitics and world-spanning ideas, he has given us an intellectual history of a century of revolutionary aspirations. The Rebel's Clinic is a what is to be done for our times. * Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator and Looking for The Stranger * Frantz Fanon has found his Isaac Deutscher in Adam Shatz. Politically and psychologically suave, The Rebel’s Clinic is as illuminating on the tragic pattern of Fanon’s private life as on the tumultuous continents through which he moved. It is also continuously insightful about Fanon's tormentingly complicated intellectual bequest on the crucial subjects of race and empire. * Pankaj Mishra *
