Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Heroic Measures: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Heroic Measures: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Heroic Measures: A Novel
    Ebook182 pages2 hours

    Heroic Measures: A Novel

    By Jill Ciment

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The basis for the major motion picture 5 Flights Up starring Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman.

    New York City is on high alert—a gasoline truck is “stuck” in the Midtown tunnel and the driver has fled. Through panic and gridlock, Alex and Ruth must transport their beloved old dachshund—whose back legs are suddenly paralyzed—to the animal hospital, using a cutting board as a stretcher. But this is also the weekend when Alex and Ruth must sell the apartment in which they have lived for most of their adult lives. Over the course of forty-eight hours, as the mystery of the missing truck driver terrorizes the city and the dachshund’s life hangs in the balance, the bidding war over their apartment becomes a barometer for collective hope and despair. Told in shifting points of view—Alex’s, Ruth’s, and the little dog’s—Heroic Measures is a moving, deft novel about urban anxiety and the love that deepens over years.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJun 30, 2009
    ISBN9780307378255
    Unavailable
    Heroic Measures: A Novel
    Author

    Jill Ciment

    Jill Cimentwas born in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of Small Claims, a collection of short stories and novellas; the novels The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artist, and Heroic Measures; and a memoir, Half a Life. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, among them a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. Ciment is a professor at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, and Brooklyn, New York. Pushkin will publish her latest novel Act of God in 2016.

    Related to Heroic Measures

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Farm Incident

      Apr 25, 2018

      The Farm Incident
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Lost Prayer

      Feb 2, 2023

      A Lost Prayer
      10 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      Nov 9, 2023

      Book Club
      5 min read

    • Article

      One Look Back

      Jun 1, 2023

      One Look Back
      20 min read

    • Article

      Euthanasia

      Aug 10, 2023

      On a frigid December morning, Hank Sanders stomped the caked mud off his worn boots and entered Discount Hardware. He couldn’t shake his cousin’s remarks. Put her down, he’d said. The words had rolled so effortlessly off his lips, as if her life mean

      11 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      Sep 14, 2023

      Book Club
      5 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Play Dead

      Mar 3, 2020

      There was a man, let’s call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let’s call her Anne B. Let’s give them a castle and make it nice. Let’s give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let’s give him a fussy way of being. Let’s make her smart and sneaky,

      17 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Apr 3, 2023

      The world is going to hell in a handbasket, right? Authors can deal with this by either sticking their heads in the sand or facing modern life head-on. This week, we have a couple of cracking novels that do the latter brilliantly. First up is Rachell

      3 min read

    • Article

      Storytime

      Aug 9, 2023

      Utterly charming story of Edie taking up a post in science at Miss Raison’s School for Girls in small Australian town York, and a room at Mrs Mason’s House for Respectable Ladies. It’s 1917 and she is still reeling from the death of brother Aubrey, l

      2 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Nov 5, 2020

      Sadly, the wonderfully prescient quotation from Samuel Pepys [FT397:70], “A dram in exchange for the pox is an ill bargain indeed,” is not by the great diarist, but from a spoof Twitter account. (https://londonist.com/london/books-and-poetry/samuel-p

      13 min read

    • Article

      Short Cuts

      Jun 13, 2021

      In EVERYBODY (Picador), out next month, Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City, employs the life of renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to investigate bodily freedoms through the major social movements of the 20th century, from sexual liberation to

      1 min read

    • Article

      Margaret Atwood Gets Personal

      Mar 10, 2023

      In 'Old Babes in the Wood,' Atwood grieves the death of her partner and bygone cultural mores. The post Margaret Atwood Gets Personal appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble Gene

      Jul 1, 2020

      One clear thing about trouble—it can set you back to zero, a personal cone of silence. And reading, writing, listening allow entry into that troubled solitude; you disappear into it regardless t of the time or place you really are in, be it bed, kitc

      12 min read

    • Article

      Fatal Attraction

      Oct 15, 2021

      What if the virus had been more deadly, more infectious? What if every country had experienced millions of deaths? These are questions most of us have asked ourselves, imagining scenarios in which, as philosopher Srećko Horvat puts it in his book Aft

      2 min read

    • Article

      Lech

      Feb 8, 2022

      Lech
      4 min read

    • Article

      Excerpt: 'The Last Thing You Surrender'

      Feb 10, 2019

      In this abridged excerpt from "The Last Thing You Surrender" by columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., elements of the all-black 761st Tank Battalion make a grisly discovery and Pvt. Luther Hayes, whose parents were murdered before his eyes by a white mob whe

      3 min read

    • Article

      Writing Sideways: Edith Wharton, the Postmodernists, and Social Satire

      Jul 13, 2020

      Familiarity may breed contempt, but in fiction it is a productive contempt The post Writing Sideways: Edith Wharton, the Postmodernists, and Social Satire appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Marked with SILVER

      Jan 17, 2024

      Marked with SILVER
      12 min read

    • Article

      Not My Cat

      Aug 21, 2023

      The rise and fall of fur, sunlight rippling across his perfectly groomed coat – it’s enchanting, hard to look away. For 30 minutes, she’s watched the cat sleeping on three blankets, folded and piled on top of one another. She’s cold, but can’t bring

      6 min read

    • Article

      In Science Fiction, We Are Never Home: Where technology leads to exile and yearning.

      Feb 10, 2021

      This essay first appeared in our “Home” issue way back in 2013. But somehow feels so timely today. Halfway through director Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, Sandra Bullock suffers the most cosmic case of homesick blues since Keir Dullea was hurled toward th

      8 min read

    Reviews for Heroic Measures

    4/5

    92 ratings14 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      On the eve of the open house to sell the five floor walk up in the East Village in which they've lived for 45 years, elderly couple Alex and Ruth Cohen discover that their beloved, and equally elderly, dachshund Dorothy's back legs are paralyzed. As they begin the trip 50 blocks uptown to the emergency veterinary hospital they learn that the city is also paralyzed, by a possible terrorist threat: a truck driver has intentionally jack-knifed his tractor trailer full of gasoline in the Midtown Tunnel and is nowhere to be found.Alex and Ruth consider and reject bids, they bid on a new apartment themselves, they worry desperately about their baby, they remember their beginnings and the life they built together, they follow the breaking news, which stretches out over an entire weekend. In under 200 crystalline pages Jill Ciment gives us a lifetime.
    • 4/5
      What a lovely gentle story. An old couple's dear daschund is suddenly paralysed, and they need to help their dog while at the same time deal with the practical details of selling their New York City apartment, all in the midst of a possible terrorist attack. The real estate dealing is funny, the dog point of view is cute but kept minimal, and the author nicely weaves in Chekhov's famous short story of "The Woman With the Pet Dog" . The city of New York is as much a character as Alex and Ruth and their dog Dorothy. It's about an old couple enjoying the winter of their lives, and their love for each other, their dog, and their city.
    • 4/5
      Wonderful tale, pretty much about nothing. leaves you wanting more nothing.
    • 2/5
      This is well done and my churlishness comes from the fact that I have trouble with a dog's point of view. Pure snobbishness I know. Ciment moves seamlessly between three perspectives, the older couple and their dog Dorothy. The older couple needs to move out of the E. Village apartment because they are too old but they don't want to leave the neighborhood. So one element of the story is the sale of the apartment with this playing out against a background of a terrorists sort of threatening the city. The emotional core of the story is the dog who is sick and needs surgery and may never recover. I commend Ciment from walking right up to the line as far as sentimentality and never quite crossing it, though this is not, shall we say, my cup of tea.
    • 4/5
      What a lovely gentle story. An old couple's dear daschund is suddenly paralysed, and they need to help their dog while at the same time deal with the practical details of selling their New York City apartment, all in the midst of a possible terrorist attack. The real estate dealing is funny, the dog point of view is cute but kept minimal, and the author nicely weaves in Chekhov's famous short story of "The Woman With the Pet Dog" . The city of New York is as much a character as Alex and Ruth and their dog Dorothy. It's about an old couple enjoying the winter of their lives, and their love for each other, their dog, and their city.
    • 3/5
      This is a short book and a fast read, that is well-written and entertaining. Poignant is the word that springs to mind. But she gives us some excellent images and characters, and the televised "crisis" that activates the plot is a wry yet pointed comment on our times.Docked a half-star for the chapters written from an animal's point of view.
    • 4/5
      A very sweet novel about an elderly couple having to seel and move from their apartment and find a new one, all while dealing with their sick old dog. The best parts of the book are when the dog's point of view suddenly appears on the page (a friend of mine who hates dogs said this was her favorite part - that the dog seemed so wise).
    • 4/5
      This is a short book but the 8 reviews written earlier suggest that it packs a lot into these few pages. And that there are many themes to reflect upon: the challenging but rewarding life in New York city for all and for the elderly, the impact of 9-11, aging, the life long romance of a couple, the love between humans and dogs from both points of view, and the impact of money upon personal ethics.I picked this book up thinking that it might be a dog-centric novel that I could give to my dog-loving friends. The reviews on the back cover quickly disabused me of this notion: "A highly original suspense novel...a heart-seizing narrative...Breathtaking - not a word is out of place." - San Francisco Chronicle; "Elegant, powerful, and, ultimately, tragic...Stunning." - Newsday. This last note, "tragic", left me expecting death of the dog or the couple or their failure to sell their fifth story walk up apartment which would soon be too much for them to handle at their age. I don't want to spoil the story but I will say that neither the dog Dorothy nor the couple die. And that I am still thinking over the word "tragic" in the Newsday review. Not a light-hearted, this book is thought-provoking, filled with love and with at least a dozen well-drawn characterizations. I will be looking at Jill Ciment's other books.
    • 5/5
      Dorothy the Dachshund, aka Dottie, is the aging and beloved companion of Alex and Ruth.Life reaches a crisis on the day that they schedule an open house for their New York walk-up apartment, a terrorist wrecks a (bomb laden?) truck in a nearby tunnel, and Dorothy's back goes out.Ciment is a master of human (and canine) understanding; Alex, Ruth, and Dottie face adversity and triumph, much to this reader's delight.
    • 4/5
      I love Jill Ciment. She creates a picture right from start and gradually expands upon it. Here, septugenarians Alex and Ruth realize that the time has come to give up their East Village walk up and move to a building with an elevator. On the night before the open house, the beloved dachshund, Dorothy, collapses in the kitchen. At the same time, their is panic in the Midtown tunnel where a gas tanker has been abandoned. They rush the dog to the hospital, fighting the chaos in NYC and return to face the unknowns of selling their apartment and finding a new place to go. Ciment hones in details that bring characters to life, such as Ruth's glasses and dress. Alex' latest creations - illuminating their FBI file and the Dorothy's observations about being in the dog hospital. Another recurring character was the women in tall boots who appeared at all the open houses. The weakest part was the end - it just happened.
    • 4/5
      This is a wonderful short novel about an elderly couple and the old dachshund they love. Other reviewers have described the storyline, so I'll just say the story drew me in within a page, and I felt I knew all the characters (including Dorothy, the dog) immediately. Even the secondary characters, such as the neighborhood falafel stand owner, were familiar from just a few words and thoughts. This is a writer to watch, and I'm off to see if I can find a copy of her Tattoo Artist.
    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed this compassionate read about life in New York for seniors and the animals they love. Ms. Ciment's technique of alternate chapters from the point of view of the couple Ruth and Alex, and their dog, Dorothy which creates the connection between owner and pet. I also appreciate her realistic portrayal of seniors and their needs and desires. Not all seniors are bumbling or senile, and it is important to remind the rest of world of that point as often as necessary so that seniors can be given the respect they deserve. I read this book in a PDF format as it was offered for a brief time on Oprah.com. It was extremely easy to read. I am not sure if it was font or size of font but it made for a quick, fast read.
    • 4/5
      Highly recommended for folks who enjoy Anne Tyler and books along the line of "Rules for Old Men Waiting." Ciment takes a single weekend in the lives of her long-married couple and turns it into a small feast. She is especially adept at writing about the patterns of life within a decades long marriage and the often times nonsensical way we care for our ancient but much-loved pets.This book can be read in a single day but will take much longer than that to forget.
    • 4/5
      Short, well-written tale that takes place over only a few days. When the story is briefly told from the dog's perspective, it is very moving and perceptive (not the usual cutesy animal perspective). An enjoyable read.