Intellectual Sleight of Hand

Most Canadians know Michael Ignatieff as an expatriate who returned home trailing clouds of glory as a journalist, novelist, essayist and Harvard professor. They know him as a smart, articulate and high-minded rookie. Best of all, they know he is not Stephen Harper, Stéphane Dion or Bob Rae. Beyond that, they do not know much.

This book, coinciding as it does with the public’s bestirred curiosity about the man who is likely to be our next prime minister, is particularly timely, which no doubt accounts for why the author rushed it to press. And though it suffers the usual weaknesses of haste and opportunism, it actually reveals quite a lot about Ignatieff—more, perhaps, than he intended. For starters, because of his exotic name, his award-winning memoir, The Russian Album and his pedigree as the descendant of tsarist nobility, he is generally pegged as his diplomat father’s son: patrician, confident to the edge of condescension and dedicated to public...