Arnon Grunberg

First sentence

Shopping

This afternoon I drank tea with Matt Gallagher, a captain in the US army.
Here is the first sentence of the first chapter of his book “Kaboom” about his experiences in Iraq, where we met each other in June 2008: “I slept through 9/11.” In the same paragraph he reminds the reader that shortly after 9/11 the president of the US asked the American citizens to keep shopping.
You can easily make fun of this advice, but I do believe that it is a sound idea in almost all circumstances: keep shopping.