Since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, human rights have become the dominant language of the public good around the globe. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Canada. The long-standing fights for aboriginal rights, the linguistic heritage of French-speaking Canadians, and same-sex marriage have steered the country into a full-blown “rights revolution” — one that is being watched carefully around the world. Are group rights jeopardizing individual rights? When everyone asserts his or her rights, what happens to collective responsibility? Can families survive and prosper when each member has rights? Is rights language empowering individuals while weakening community? These essays, taken from Michael Ignatieff's famous Massey Lectures, addresses these questions and more, arguing passionately for the Canadian approach to rights that emphasizes deliberation rather than confrontation, compromise rather than violence. In a new afterword, the author explores Canada’s political achievements and distinctive stance on rights, and offers penetrating commentary on more recent world events.

Winner of the Royal Society of Literature AwardIn The Russian Album, Michael Ignatieff chronicles five generations of his Russian family, beginning in 1815. Drawing on family diaries, on the contemplation of intriguing photographs in an old family album, and on stories passed down from father to son, he comes to terms with the meaning of his family's memories and histories. Focusing on his grandparents, Count Paul Ignatieff and Princess Natasha Mestchersky, he recreates their lives before, during, and after the Russian Revolution.

Until the end of the Cold War, the politics of national identity were confined to isolated incidents of ethnic strife and civil war in distant countries. With the collapse of Communist regimes across Europe and the loosening of the Cold War's clamp on East–West relations, a surge of nationalism swept the world stage. In Blood and Belonging, Ignatieff makes a thorough examination of why blood ties—in places as diverse as Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Germany, and the former Soviet republics—may be the definitive factor in international relations today. He asks how ethnic pride turned into ethnic cleansing, whether modern citizens can lay to rest the ghosts of a warring past, why—and whether—a people need a state of their own. Blood and Belonging is a profound and searching look at one of the most complex issues of our time. Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Gordon Montador Award for Best Canadian Book on Social Issues "Ignatieff's probing analysis of the meanings and consequences of 'the new nationalism' provides crucial insights into the fragility of 'civic nationalism' and the 'liberal virtues [of] tolerance, compromise, reason.'"— Booklist

Foreword by Michael IgnatieffPreface by Rudyard Griffiths, The Dominion InstituteWithout departure, there is no arrival -- this is the experience of some of Canada's best-known émigré authors and public figures, shared in Passages: Welcome Home to Canada.In first-hand accounts, these celebrated writers explore the excitement and anguish of uprooting to a new country. Childhood memories, familiar streets, the aromas of local cooking, long-cherished plans -- to leave all this behind can only be traumatic. And yet, to find a haven from oppression and danger, a place to carve out a new identity and put down new roots -- this is a thrill only an emigrant can know. In Passages we see this terrible pain and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for growth in delicate balance.Alberto Manguel discovers the quiet pleasure of citizenship after years of cosmopolitan wandering. Ken Wiwa looks for a fresh start, far from the shadow of his martyred father in Africa. Nino Ricci, having grown up in an old-world Italian community transplanted to rural Ontario, describes his passage into the larger world, where other families don’t bake their own bread or slaughter their own pigs. Shyam Selvadurai tells of his flight from the intolerance of his native Sri Lanka, where, as a Tamil and a homosexual, he found himself unwelcome. Moses Znaimer describes his parents’ hair-raising escape first from Hitler and then Stalin, a series of adventures through Eastern Europe and Central Asia and finally across the Atlantic.Introduced by Michael Ignatieff, Passages explores what it means to be a foreigner, what it means to be a writer and what it means to be a Canadian -- and what it means to be all three at once.Contributors: Michelle Berry • Ying Chen • Brian D. Johnson • Dany Laferriere • Alberto Manguel • Anna Porter • Nino Ricci • Shyam Selvadurai • M. G. Vassanji • Ken Wiwa • Moses ZnaimerFrom the Hardcover edition.

In his prize-winning memoir, The Russian Album, Michael Ignatieff chronicled the fortunes of his father's family in Russia and in Canada. Now, in True Patriot Love, Ignatieff turns to his mother's family, the Grants. Over three generations the Grants conducted a spirited public argument about what Canada was and should be. True Patriot Love is both a tribute to and a reckoning with that inheritance. In 1872, the author's great-grandfather George Monro Grant, set out with Sandford Fleming to map out the railway line that would link Canada from ocean to ocean. His grandfather William Lawson Grant fought at the Somme in World War I and came home believing that Canada had earned the right to call itself a fully independent nation. His son George Grant, author of Lament for a Nation, believed that Canada had gone from colony to nation and back to colonyżof the United States. Michael Ignatieff retells the history of his ancestors as a story of one family's search for Canada. He has turned a family memoir into a history of their love of country.

Charlie Johnson is an American journalist working for a British news agency somewhere in the Balkans. He believes that over the course of a long career he has seen everything, but suddenly he finds himself more than simply a witness. A woman who has been sheltering Charlie and his crew is doused in gasoline and set on fire. As she stumbles, burning, down the road, Charlie dashes from hiding and throws her down, rolling her over and over to extinguish the flames, and burning his hands in the process. Believing the woman's life to have been saved, Charlie is traumatized by her subsequent death. Something in him snaps. He now realizes he has just one ambition left in life: to find the colonel responsible for her death and confront him. Charlie Johnson in the Flames is a major novel by award-winning author Michael Ignatieff, one of the leading political thinkers of our age. A profound meditation on war and guilt, it moves with the pace of a thriller. Indeed, the image of Charlie wrestling with the burning woman might stand as a metaphor for the entire relationship between the West and the rest of the world.

Renowned author and former Liberal Party of Canada leader Michael Ignatieff delivers a stirring meditation on contemporary politics and the lessons he learned in defeat. Candid and utterly unexpected, this book is not just for Canadians concerned about the future of the Liberal Party, but for all citizens concerned about the future of Canada and of political discourse in today's increasingly partisan world. In 2011, the "Natural Governing Party of Canada" suffered its greatest defeat when Stephen Harper's Conservatives won a majority and Jack Layton's NDP superseded the Liberals to form the Official Opposition. It has spawned a time of soul-searching for the Liberal Party and its former leader, Michael Ignatieff--but while the party continues to look for answers, Ignatieff has found his in Fire and Ashes: the reasons why he went into politics in the first place. In what he says is the most difficult book he's ever written, Ignatieff (the son of a Canadian...