Nimble and engrossing ... An examplary work ... At times as I read The Rebel’s Clinic, I yearned for a little more insight not into Fanon the brilliant doctor or Fanon the rousing revolutionary but Fanon the person ... Eloquent.
Absorbing ... Shatz...is a mostly steady hand in turbulent waters ... Part of what gives The Rebel’s Clinic its intellectual heft is Shatz’s willingness to write into such tensions.
Sober and thorough ... One gift of The Rebel’s Clinic is that it amplifies the radical nature of Fanon’s work within the hospital setting ... hatz spends enough time complicating the language around violence that we lose sight of the fact that Fanon saw the undivided collective—rather than any particular means to bring it about, violent or otherwise—as the key to resistance, that which he celebrated, codified, and offered back to the world.
Insightful ... Shatz is a sober and informed guide to this territory. He is an erudite writer, and not afraid to show off his erudition. But while this makes for a less snappy narrative, his frequent detours into the intellectual currents that surrounded Fanon...are useful.
Captures the restless energy that makes Frantz Fanon such a compelling figure ... Given Fanon’s continuing influence, from the seminar room to social media to the streets, few would object to another effort to tell the story of his extraordinary life. Adam Shatz is well positioned to do so ... The book’s many supporting characters are skillfully evoked.
Shatz brings existing accounts of Fanon’s life together with published memoirs of people who knew him, new interviews and interpretations of his writing ... The author’s primary concern is less to do with situating Fanon in a collective history than with offering a portrait, as he puts it, of a 'man', not an icon ... Fanon’s attention to the lived scale of everyday life, as well as to how bodies and minds are socially produced, still offers us examples for rethinking and rebuilding a lived politics of both care and critique.
A strength of The Rebel’s Clinic is the meticulous charting of the schools and figures that influenced Fanon’s thought ... Does not reveal a strikingly different Fanon than does David Macey’s deeply researched Frantz Fanon: A Biography (2000). But it delivers a smoother, often engrossing, narrative, one that deserves to be the first stop for anyone looking for an introduction to Fanon’s life and work.
An impressive accomplishment ... The range is impressive (if gendered) and has the virtue of putting Fanon into conversation with a variety of perspectives, but Fanon sometimes gets lost in the crowd ... Skillful as these chapters are in presenting Fanon’s shifting contexts, the man himself remains elusive.
Thoroughly researched ... A deep meditation on the transformative power and influence of one radical philosophical writer on the continuing fight for justice on many fronts.