Fire and Ashes

Michael Ignatieff

“Michael Ignatieff is an extraordinary person. His memoir is a unique combination of learning, compassion, and wisdom brought to bear on the mess and grind of politics. He writes beautifully, and honestly. I know no book which gives a clearer sense of what it feels like to fight for a vision amidst the flaws and potential of our modern democracies.”—Rory Stewart, MP, author of The Places in Between

“The shelves are full of memoirs written by successful politicians, painting their careers with the rosy glow of battles won. Michael Ignatieff tells a very different tale: of humility, self-discovery, and human connection. It is a book that plumbs the essence of politics, one that all voters and the leaders who would represent them should read.”—Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton University

“A distinguished intellectual, writer, journalist, and academic gives up his library and his chair at Harvard to pursue a political career at the highest level and for six years he experiences the passion and the fever, the enthusiasm and the intrigue, the failure and the success of party politics in the vast Canadian scene. Six years after that immersion in political life, he goes back to his library, he does some thinking, and he offers us an exceptionally insightful and honest account of that adventure. This book is a compass that will help the reader find his or her way in the dizzying maze that politics has become in the great modern democracies.”—Mario Vargas Llosa

“This book is fantastic. The insights into the realities of democratic politics are not only subtle and intelligent but I believe they are of extraordinary importance to anyone trying to understand the possibilities of democracy and the modern life of politics.”—Marc Stears, University of Oxford