Frantz Fanon’s life was short; he died of cancer in 1961 at 36. But even in a short life, it is possible to fill many roles, as several new biographies show us. The most ambitious and extensive is The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz, the New York editor for the London Review of Books and a specialist in France’s intellectual and colonial history. His main novel insight is the indissoluble tie between the psychiatrist and the revolutionary activist in the Algerian liberation. With new sources, including conversations with colleagues and comrades still alive, Shatz also gets closer to a private sphere that has previously been little known. Particularly interesting are his sophisticated examinations of Fanon’s most central works, especially his close reading of The Wretched of the Earth. Without denying the book’s importance as an analysis of colonialism as a system of violence and a prophetic voice against neocolonialism, he warns against uncritical canonization. Even if Fanon regards armed struggle as a last resort and argues that it can offer the oppressed a way out of fatalism and internalized inferiority, Shatz shows that at the same time he explicitly rejects hatred, spontaneous violence, and personal revenge, emphasizing that disciplined and strategic struggle under political leadership is the only democratic alternative. He also points out that as a psychiatrist Fanon was aware of the human suffering and the costs violence has for participants both in the French army and in the liberation struggle. In Shatz’ words, Fanon is more a diagnostician of violence than an apologist and is far more nuanced and ambivalent than the caricature found in Jean Paul Sartre’s well-known preface.