Research Catalog

Title

Heroic measures / a novel by Jill Ciment.

Author

Ciment, Jill, 1953-

Publication

New York : Pantheon Books, [2009], ©2009.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

191 pages; 21 cm

Summary

"A gasoline tanker truck is "stuck" in the Midtown Tunnel. New Yorkers are panicked ... Is this the next big attack? Alex, an artist, and Ruth, a former school-teacher with an FBI file as thick as a dictionary, must get their beloved dachshund, whose back legs have suddenly become paralyzed, to the animal hospital sixty blocks north. But the streets of Manhattan are welded solid with traffic. Their dog, Dorothy, twelve years old and gray-faced, is the emotional center of Alex and Ruth's forty-five-year-long childless marriage. Using a cutting board as a stretcher, they ferry the dog uptown." "This is also the weekend that Alex and Ruth must sell their apartment. While house hunters traipse through it during their open house, husband and wife wait by the phone to hear from the animal hospital. During the course of forty-eight hours, as the missing truck driver terrorizes the city, the price of their apartment becomes a barometer for collective hope and despair as the real-estate market spikes and troughs with every breaking news story." "In shifting points of view - Alex's, Ruth's, and the little dog's - man, woman, and one small tenacious beast try to make sense of the cacophony of rumors, opinions, and innuendos coming from news anchors, cable-TV pundits, pollsters, bomb experts, hostages, witnesses, real-estate agents, house hunters, bargain seekers, howling dogs, veterinarians, nurses, and cabdrivers."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

• Manhattan (New York, N.Y.) > Fiction
• Television feature stories > Fiction
• Missing persons > Fiction
• Human-animal relationships > Fiction

ISBN

• 9780375425226
• 0375425225

LCCN

• 2008034624
• 40016952145

OCLC

• 243941647
• ocn243941647
• SCSB-5483281

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries