An intellectual, psychiatrist, polemicist, by all accounts both a brilliantly compassionate healer and a provocative apologist for violence, Frantz Fanon was a challenging figure at a taxing historical moment. It is a symptom of the complexity of our own time that more than sixty years after his death, interest in his life—or, as Shatz rightly notes in the title of this exceptional book, his lives—has revived.

Fanon is known to most Americans as the author of Les damnés de la terre, published shortly before his death at age thirty-six in 1961. An English translation, The Wretched of the Earth, was published by Grove Press in 1965 and instantly became a foundational text in the anticolonial and Black Power movements in the United States. It was, and remains, an unusually astute and often lacerating analysis of the logic of colonialism and the struggle both to escape and to...

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