Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics Hardback - 2013

Media reviews

“Extraordinary…. Fire and Ashes is a brilliant testament to the state of our politics, a cautionary tale about the perils, and pleasures, of political life and a must-read primer for anyone contemplating a political career.”
 —Robert Collison, Toronto Star
 
“Compelling and curiously moving account…. For a clear-eyed, sharply observed, mordant but ultimately hopeful account of contemporary politics this memoir is hard to beat.”
 —The Guardian
 
“A charming book, frank and funny.”
 —Paul Wells, Maclean’s
 
“Engagingly frank…. Ignatieff has written an elegant, thoughtful, candid book.”
 —Financial Times  
 
“An honest account, full of wisdom hard won.”
 —John Ivison, National Post 
 
“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