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Surrender : 40 songs, one story  Cover Image E-book E-book

Surrender : 40 songs, one story / Bono.

Bono, 1960- (author.).

Summary:

"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 will appear throughout the book."-- Provided by publisher.

Record details

  • ISBN: 9780385695367
  • ISBN: 0385695365
  • Physical Description: 1 online resource
  • Publisher: Toronto : Doubleday Canada, 2022.
Subject: Bono, 1960-
Rock musicians > Ireland > Biography.
Singers > Ireland > Biography.
U2 (Musical group)
Bono, 1960-
U2 (Musical group)
Rock musicians.
Singers.
Ireland.
Genre: Biographies.

Electronic resources


  • Baker & Taylor
    One of the music world's most iconic artists writes about his remarkable life for the first time, from his early days growing up in Dublin, to U2's meteoric rise to fame, to his more than twenty years of activism dedicated to the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty.
  • Random House, Inc.
    NATIONAL BESTSELLER
    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

    "I was born with an eccentric heart."

    A remarkable book by a combative artist, who finds he's at his best when he learns how to surrender.

    Episodic and irreverent, introspective and illuminating, Surrender is Bono's life story, organized—but not too tidily—around forty U2 songs.

    Bono grew up on the Northside of Dublin with a Catholic father and a Protestant mother during a time of rising sectarian violence in Ireland. The loss of his mother at the age of fourteen was the absence that would shape his search for family. He started out life feeling average, but ultimately his whole life would be pitted against the assumption that anyone is average.

    His creativity is chaotic but ever present . . . in the studio, onstage, at the protest, along the halls of Congress, or in a corner bar. We read about his anger issues, which colour his writing on love and nonviolence, and hear him own up to an ego "far taller than my self-esteem."

    Across four decades, U2 transform from teenage wannabes to the biggest band in the world, and Bono evolves from a part-time activist to a full-time force in the fight to cancel poor countries' debt and persuade governments, particularly the United States, to respond to the global AIDS emergency. We are with him at the birth of PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. At the time, it amounted to the biggest health intervention in the history of medicine to fight a single disease. He describes the campaigners of ONE, the NGO he cofounded, as "factivists" and sister organization (RED) as a "gateway drug" to activism.

    U2 fans will learn why Bono believes U2 have stayed together despite decades of personal struggle and fiery creative disagreements and find keys to unlock the meaning of the band's most popular and influential songs.

    The doors are opened to Bono's interior life. The squandering of human potential is a constant theme, as is his faith, which he describes as sorting the signal from the noise, a "still small voice" he hears strongest in his marriage, his music, and in the fight against extreme poverty.

    Above all, Surrender is a love story written to his wife, Ali, whom he asked out on a first date the same week as the band's first rehearsal. Alison Stewart supplies direction for every major scene in this drama, including the third act they now enter, with more questions than answers regarding what to fight for and when to surrender.

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