Book Review: "Fire and Ashes"

Micheal Ignatieff wrote "Fire and Ashes, Success and Failure in Politics".  It's a short book, 183 smallish pages.

Ignatieff's great-grandfather was an ambassador and later Minister of Interior in Czarist Russian.  His grandfather rose to be the Minister of Education under the last Czar, Nicholas II.  They left Russia at the time of the 1917 revolution, and ended up in Canada.  His father worked for the Canadian government office in London during WWII, and after the war, in the Foreign Service.  One can not help but think that this family history of public service and political background had a great influence on Ignatieff.  He says that it was in his blood.  As a young man, he was an admirer of both Jack Kennedy and Pierre Trudeau.  He went to graduate school at Harvard, was a fellow there, and later joined the faculty in political science.  But he never became a  American citizen.

In 2004, he was asked by some members of the Liberal Party in Canada to return home and run for a seat in the Parliament, as a prelude to becoming that party's leader.  He decided to do so.  Much like Obama, his political star rose as a result of an electrifying speech at a Liberal Party convention.  In 2008, he became Liberal party leader.

But his ex-pat background came to be a significant political liability later; he was pounded for it by the Conservatives.  And in 2011, after losing his seat in Parliament in a Conservative landslide, he left Canadian politics for good.  He was only the third leader of the Liberal Party in its entire history to not serve as Prime Minister of Canada.  He is now on the faculty at both Harvard and the University of Toronto.

I found this book full of insights and meditations on what it takes to succeed in politics, and what can (and did) go wrong.  The Canadian political system is different in many ways from the US system, but there are also many similarities.  Ignatieff makes interesting observations about both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  He also offers a look into what happens internally to a person who steps into the political arena, how friends become adversaries, and how compromises are made...or not made.  I recommend this book as an interesting and personal look inside the life of one contemporary thoughtful politician in a vibrant democracy, the one geographically closest to us Americans.