Frantz Fanon was considered a radical thinker in his time. But nowadays, who honestly defends colonization? Maybe a few old right wing French and Brits muttering through their mustaches in smoke-filled bars in Aix-en-Provence and Sheffield, but the rest of us have come to realize the truth of the matter. In "Black Skin, White Masks," Fanon performed a subtle psychological analysis of the colonial situation, but in "The Wretched of the Earth," he takes his fight to the streets. And he has plenty of horror stories from his work as a clinical psychiatrist in Algeria to back it up.

Fanon, also, unlike some of his acolytes, approached the postcolonial situation with a certain degree of skepticism. He recognized the follies of tribalism, and the vicious economic imperialism being conducted by French and American corporations in the newly liberated nations of Africa, the Arab World, and Asia. And, much like the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, he demonstrates how the vulgar nouveaux-riches of those nations are just as much the enemy of the people of the third world as the colonists. While Fanon's analysis is a bit dated now, the heart of the matter remains the same, and this is still very relevant reading for anyone interested in the developing world.