Northern exposure
It all started one night in 2004 over dinner at the Charles Hotel. Professor Michael Ignatieff and his wife, Zsuzsanna, sat down with three mysterious strangers, whom the couple later referred to as the “men in black.” Their pitch to Ignatieff was as intriguing as it was audacious, given his background as an accomplished teacher, journalist, and novelist. Would he leave the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) to run for leader of Canada’s beleaguered Liberal Party, and ultimately for prime minister? “What didn’t well up inside me was laughter. It should have. The idea was preposterous,” Ignatieff writes in “Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics,” an elegant and unflinching memoir of his disastrous six-year flameout from the pillowy cocoon of academia into the foul trenches of modern politics. The book is out this month from Harvard University Press. “ ‘Fire and Ashes’ is the story of why … I said yes to the...