Adam Shatz's biography of Frantz Fanon is the most complete portrait yet written of the psychiatrist and revolutionary theorist whose writings on race, colonialism, and violence continue to shape radical movements decades after his death. Shatz, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, draws on extensive archival research and interviews to follow Fanon from his childhood in Martinique through his education in France, where he studied under Merleau-Ponty and encountered racism that radicalized his politics, to his work as a psychiatrist in colonial Algeria. There, Fanon treated both torture victims and their torturers, an experience that profoundly informed his theoretical work. The book examines how Fanon's clinical practice shaped his analysis of colonialism's psychological damage in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Shatz neither hagiographizes Fanon nor dismisses his more troubling arguments about violence, instead presenting a thinker grappling with impossible circumstances. Fanon emerges as a figure of extraordinary intellectual range: a trained psychiatrist who understood trauma at the individual level, a political theorist who analyzed oppression as a system, and an activist who committed himself to Algeria's independence movement at great personal cost. The biography also serves as a history of decolonization, capturing the moment when colonial empires crumbled and new possibilities seemed within reach. Shatz contextualizes Fanon's work within the broader intellectual currents of postwar France and the Third World liberation movements that embraced his ideas. The result is essential reading for understanding one of the twentieth century's most influential and controversial intellectuals.