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Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story
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About This Book
Bono--artist, activist, and the lead singer of Irish rock band U2--has written a memoir: honest and irreverent, intimate and profound, Surrender is the story of the remarkable life he's lived, the challenges he's faced, and the friends and family who have shaped and sustained him. "When I started to write this book, I was hoping to draw in detail what I'd previously only sketched in songs. The people, places, and possibilities in my life. Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me. Growing up in Ireland in the seventies with my fists up (musically speaking), it was not a natural concept. A word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book. I am still grappling with this most humbling of commands. In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist. Surrender is the story of one pilgrim's lack of progress ... With a fair amount of fun along the way." --Bono As one of the music world's most iconic artists and the cofounder of the organizations ONE and (RED), Bono's career has been written about extensively. But in Surrender, it's Bono who picks up the pen, writing for the first time about his remarkable life and those he has shared it with. In his unique voice, Bono takes us from his early days growing up in Dublin, including the sudden loss of his mother when he was fourteen, to U2's unlikely journey to become one of the world's most influential rock bands, to his more than twenty years of activism dedicated to the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty. Writing with candor, self-reflection, and humor, Bono opens the aperture on his life--and the family, friends, and faith that have sustained, challenged, and shaped him. Surrender's subtitle, 40 Songs, One Story, is a nod to the book's forty chapters, which are each named after a U2 song. Bono has also created forty original drawings for Surrender, which appear throughout the book.
Reviews
"This one finds Bono examining his conscience more knowledgeably than most."
"At nearly every turn, the author spends less time on band details than he does wrestling with the ethical implications of his successes and failures ..."
"There's a casual charm to the memoir, a feeling of being led through caverns of story by a guide with some things to get off his chest ..."
"Running to 557 pages, Surrender is characteristically expansive, but it whizzes by ..."
"Surrender is, in its own generous way, a book written by an Irishman to tell his mother how much he misses her, to tell his mates how much he rates them, and to let his wife and children know how much he loves them ..."
"The triumphs U2 has achieved throughout its nearly five-decade history are recounted with a combination of awe and disbelief."
"The biggest challenge for Surrender is that it has to compete with Bono's history as one of pop's great orators."
"Yet readers will search in vain for salacious details or gossipy indiscretions."
"With remarkable frankness, he details what makes a great song...domestic life with his wife, Ali, and their four children; how the band almost fell apart ..."
"Are — it displays more self-awareness and humility than you might expect from this world-saving type ..."
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