January 2011

Contact Tourism Halifax (902-421-8736) for its excellent brochure The Greater Halifax Visitor Guide , which lists and pictures everything you will want to see—much more, in fact, than there is room for here. I can’t think of a better hotel choice than the Sheraton Halifax (800-325-3535), perched right on the edge of the historic waterfront and built in a low-rise peaked-roof style that echoes the lines of the old port buildings. Make a point of booking a room with a waterfront view—and then call again to confirm the view. It’s worth it.

Passionate travelers tend to seek out distant landings and exotic outposts; it’s the very foreignness of a place we’re after. Still, there’s also something secretly satisfying about slipping over a border only to discover what is most American about the other side—not in the sense of another McDonald’s or a branch of the Gap but in the way of a kinship to the core that in the case of Halifax, Nova Scotia, harks back to its 1749 founding as the first English settlement in Canada.

Whenever the debate now in progress about a national health-care bill heats up, I remind myself of how lucky I am as a senior citizen (a euphemism that, like the flabby word elderly , I dislike) to have the issue at least partly settled in my case. As a Social Security recipient automatically in the Medicare program, I am insured for a good part of my medical expenses. It seems so natural that I have a hard time realizing that Medicare is young enough to be practically an innovation. It was enacted in 1965—but not without long and hot debate.

The Senate last spring failed, by a narrow margin, to muster the two-thirds majority needed to pass a constitutional amendment that would have required a balanced federal budget.

Certainly, with the annual federal deficit in the hundreds of billions of dollars, something is needed to bring fiscal discipline to Washington. But would a simple balanced-budget requirement supply it? Curiously—or perhaps not so curiously, as we will see—the political opposition, which ranged right across the spectrum, never mentioned the most important reason it would not: The federal government does not adhere to GAAP—generally accepted accounting principles. Nor does it use independent accountants. In other words, politicians, not accountants, decide how to keep track of the federal government’s financial affairs.

edited by Mario R. DiNunzio, St. Martin’s Press, 359 pages, $24.95 . CODE: STM-2

by James Card, Knopf, 304 pages, $35.00 . CODE: RAN-21

The first film James Card remembers seeing was The Birth of a Nation , and during his childhood in the 1920s he took in five pictures a week in Cleveland, Ohio. He soon had his own Moviegraph projector, and he went on to become a film collector, historian, and founder of the George Eastman film archive.

narrated by Robert Ryan, Pacific Arts, five volumes, eight and one-half hours, $139.98 . CODE: BAT-11

directed by Ron Maxwell, Turner Home Entertainment, 254 mins., $95.98 . CODE: BAT-10

directed by Matthew Seig, BMG Video, 97 mins., $29.98 . CODE: BAT-9