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Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story Hardcover – November 1, 2022
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“A brilliant, very funny, very revealing autobiography-through-music. Maybe the best book ever written about being a rockstar.” —Caitlin Moran, award-winning journalist
“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.
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Print length576 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherKnopf
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Publication dateNovember 1, 2022
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Dimensions6.46 x 1.45 x 9.28 inches
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ISBN-100525521046
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ISBN-13978-0525521044
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Honest and direct . . . [Surrender] is defined largely by humility. This is an introspective story written by a man whose spirit is never far removed from the sadness and grief of his childhood; the hunger, literal and figurative, of a teen wannabe rocker; and the gratitude of one who worked his butt off and made it to the top . . . This is the rare rock star memoir written by a rock star who, you get the impression, could have been a writer . . . Bono has a gift for making even the unattainable seem relatable . . . He’s humble, even self-effacing. He might be fun to have a beer with. He is very much of this Earth, even if on occasion he might seem to float above the water.” —The L.A. Times
“Compelling . . . Surrender is more introspective than salacious or score-settling, and proof that the tunesmith who wrote it also speaks fluent prose.” —The Washington Post
“Surrender soars whenever the spotlight comes on. Bono is never more powerful, on the page or the stage, than when he strives for the transcendence that only music can offer . . . [Bono] is open and honest, with language that can be witty and distinctive, addressing his competitive relationship with his father or growing up against the backdrop of Ireland’s political violence.” —The New York Times
“Lovely and thoughtfully written . . . An earthy, self-deprecating, often funny appraisal of the sometimes contradictory paths Bono has traveled.” —Vulture
“This is Bono at his best: thoughtful, reflective, revealing a wisdom that his rock-star persona covers up . . . At the root of it all you don't doubt his decency or integrity.” ―The Times (UK)
“A rattling good yarn . . . characteristically expansive, but it whizzes by . . . Bono has storytelling verve and a genuine desire for self-examination and is enthusiastic about praising others, often at his own expense . . . [A] generous, energetic book.” ―The Guardian (UK)
“Bono's memoir bares his soul . . . Has any rock superstar written a more revealing biography? He deftly balances the comical and profound and packs anecdotes with cameos by the rich and famous, from Frank Sinatra to Pope John Paul II.” ―Daily Telegraph (UK)
“Beautifully evoked, a mixture of Joycean exuberance and Chandleresque irony . . . most revealing are the intimate personal experiences that shaped him and his chaotic creative process. Punctuating it all is the music. Each chapter uses a U2 song to pull us down memory lane.” ―The Sunday Times (UK)
“Bono's honesty will win over his harshest critics . . . the U2 frontman's memoir is a triumph . . . Honest, witty, informative and beautifully written. Surrender will surely join the ranks of the great rock memoirs.”―Irish Independent (UK)
“Sometimes confessional, many times humorous, and always clever and entertaining, Bono has delivered a fascinating autobiography of a major force in popular music and world affairs for all readers.” —Library Journal [starred review]
“Bono's first book will generate enormous interest . . . That the singer-songwriter writes well for the page should not come as a surprise, but his drawings might. Fans of Bono and U2 will adore this rich and expansive memoir, while music lovers of all persuasions will find much to enjoy here, too.” —Booklist [starred review]
“A powerful and candid debut memoir . . . 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 during the 1990 recording of Achtung Baby; why he always wears glasses; and his experience of the conflict between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland . . . Self-aware and poignantly reflective, this is a must-read.” —Publishers Weekly [starred review]
About the Author
Alongside his role in U2, Bono is a ground-breaking activist. A leader in Jubilee 2000’s Drop the Debt campaign, he next took on the fight against HIV/AIDS and extreme poverty, co-founding sister organizations ONE and (RED). ONE is a movement of millions of people dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable disease. With ONE, Bono has lobbied heads of state and legislatures all around the world, helping to ensure the passage of programs, such as the U.S. PEPFAR AIDS program, that have helped to save tens of millions of lives over the past twenty years. (RED)—which partners with companies to raise public awareness about, and corporate contributions for, the AIDS crisis—has to date generated more than $700 million for the Global Fund to treat and prevent AIDS in Africa. Since 2020, ONE and (RED) have also been fighting COVID-19 and its impact on the developing world.
In 2016, Bono co-founded the Rise Fund, a global impact fund investing in entrepreneurial companies driving positive social and environmental change in alignment with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Bono has received a number of awards for his music and activism, including the Freedom of the City of Dublin (with U2), Chile’s Pablo Neruda Medal of Honor, the Légion d’honneur from the French government, an honorary British knighthood, the Fulbright Prize for International Understanding, and TIME magazine’s Person of the Year (along with Bill and Melinda Gates). He lives in Dublin with his wife Ali Hewson.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Lights of Home
I shouldn’t be here ’cause I should be dead
I can see the lights in front of me
I believe my best days are ahead
I can see the lights in front of me.
I was born with an eccentric heart. In one of the chambers of my heart, where most people have three doors, I have two. Two swinging doors, which at Christmas 2016 were coming off their hinges. The aorta is your main artery, your lifeline, carrying the blood oxygenated by your lungs, and becoming your life. But we have discovered that my aorta has been stressed over time and developed a blister. A blister that’s about to burst, which would put me in the next life faster than I can make an emergency call. Faster than I can say goodbye to this life.
So, here I am. Mount Sinai Hospital. New York City.
Looking down on myself from above with the arc lights reflecting on the stainless steel. I’m thinking the light is harder than the steel counter I’m lying on. My body feels separate from me. It is soft flesh and hard bone.
It’s not a dream or vision, but it feels as if I’m being sawn in half by a magician. This eccentric heart has been frozen.
Some remodeling needs to take place apart from all this hot blood swirling around and making a mess, which blood tends to do when it’s not keeping you alive.
Blood and air.
Blood and guts.
Blood and brains are what’s required right now, if I’m to continue to sing my life and live it.
My blood.
The brains and the hands of the magician who is standing over me and can turn a really bad day into a really good one with the right strategy and execution.
Nerves of steel and blades of steel.
Now this man is climbing up and onto my chest, wielding his blade with the combined forces of science and butchery. The forces required to break and enter someone’s heart. The magic that is medicine.
I know it’s not going to feel like a good day when I wake up after these eight hours of surgery, but I also know that waking up is better than the alternative.
Even if I can’t breathe and feel as if I am suffocating. Even if I’m desperately drawing for air and can’t find any.
Even if I can’t breathe and feel as if I am suffocating. Even if I’m desperately drawing for air and can’t find any.
Even if I’m hallucinating, ’cause I’m seeing visions now and it’s all getting a little William Blake.
I’m so cold. I need to be beside you, I need your warmth, I need your loveliness. I’m dressed for winter. I have big boots on in bed, but I’m freezing to death.
I am dreaming.
I am in a scene from some movie where the life is draining out of the actor in the lead role. In the last moments of his life he is vexed and questioning his great love.
“Why are you going? Don’t leave me!”
“I’m right here,” his lover reminds him. “I haven’t moved.”
“What? It’s not you leaving? Am I the one walking away? Why am I walking away? I don’t want to leave you. Please, don’t let me leave.”
There are some dirty little secrets about success that I’m just waking up to. And from.
Success as an outworking of dysfunction, an excuse for obsessive compulsive tendencies.
Success as a reward for really, really hard work, which may be obscuring some kind of neurosis.
Success should come with a health warning—for the workaholic and for those around them.
Success may be propelled by some unfair advantage or circumstance. If not privilege, then a gift, a talent, or some other form of inherited wealth.
But hard work also hides behind some of these doors.
I always thought mine was a gift for finding top-line melody not just in music but in politics, in commerce, and in the world of ideas in general.
Where others would hear harmony or counterpoint, I was better at finding the top line in the room, the hook, the clear thought. Probably because I had to sing it or sell it.
But now I see that my advantage was something more prosaic, more base. Mine was a genetic advantage, the gift of . . . air.
That’s right.
Air.
“Your man has a lot of firepower in that war chest of his.”
That’s the man who sawed through my breastbone speaking to my wife and next of kin, Ali, after the operation.
“We needed extra-strong wire to sew him up. He’s probably at about 130 percent of normal lung capacity for his age.”
He doesn’t use the word “freak,” but Ali tells me she has started thinking of me as the Man from Atlantis, from that 1970s sci-fi series about an amphibian detective.
David Adams, the man I will owe my life to, the surgeon-magician, speaks with a southern twang, and in my heightened Blakean state I begin to confuse him with the crazed villain of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I overhear him asking Ali about tenors, who are not known to run around a stage hitting high notes.
“Aren’t tenors supposed to stand with two legs apart, firmly rooted in the ground, before even considering a top C?”
“Yes,” I say, without opening my mouth and before the drugs wear off. “A tenor has to turn his head into a sound box and his body into a bellows to make those glasses smash.”
I, on the other hand, have been racing around arenas and sprinting through stadiums for thirty years singing “Pride (In the Name of Love),” the high A or B depending on the year.
In the 1980s the stylish English songster Robert Palmer stopped Adam Clayton to plead with him. “Will you ever get your singer to sing a few steps lower. He’ll make it easier on himself, and all of us who have to listen.”
Air is stamina.
Air is the confidence to take on big challenges or big opponents.
Air is not the will to conquer whatever Everest you will encounter in your life, but it is the ability to endure the climb.
Air is what you need on any north face.
Air is what gives a small kid on a playground the belief that he won’t be bullied, or if he is, that the bully will have the air knocked out of him.
And here I am now without it, for the first time.
In a hospital emergency room, without air.
Without breath.
The names we give God.
All breath.
Jehovaaaah.
Allaaaah.
Yeshuaaaah.
Without air . . . without an air . . . without an aria.
I am terrified because for the first time ever, I reach for my faith and I can’t find it.
Without air.
Without a prayer.
I am a tenor singing underwater. I can feel my lungs filling up. I am drowning.
I am hallucinating. I am seeing a vision of my father in a hospital bed and me sleeping beside him, on a mattress on the floor. Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, the summer of 2001. He is deep breathing, but it’s getting shallower and shallower like the grave in his chest. He shouts my name, confusing me with my brother or the other way around.
“Paul. Norman. Paul.”
“Da.”
I jump up and call a nurse.
“Are you okay, Bob?” she whispers in his ear.
We are in a world of percussive, animated whispers, a world of sibilance, his tenor now become short tiny breaths, an s after every exhalation.
“Yesssss sssss sss.”
His Parkinson’s disease has stolen the sonority.
“I want to go home sssssss I want to get out of here sssss.”
“Say it again, Da.”
Like the nurse, I am leaning over him, my ear close to his mouth.
Silence.
Followed by another silence.
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf; First Edition (November 1, 2022)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 576 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525521046
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525521044
- Item Weight : 1.95 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.46 x 1.45 x 9.28 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #19,301 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Social Activist Biographies
- #30 in Rock Band Biographies
- #171 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
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I am huge fan of U2 and Bono - Loved this book
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Surrender 40 songs One Story by Bono Review
Marcus Stone
About the author
Bono, born Paul David Hewson, has been headlining stadiums with U2 for four decades. The band have sold 170 million records and have won 22 Grammys and a host of other awards, including the Kennedy Center Honors. He lives with his wife, Ali, and four children in Dublin, Ireland. Surrender is his first book.
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His writing style is engaging.
Some of the material is obvious in an autobiography of a rock star. An early interest in music, the background and formation of U2.
Musically, the most interesting material is the motivation and circumstances when writing some of their songs and Bono's experiences as a front man.
Another interesting part of the book was Bono's experience as an activist.
His take on music stars and politicians was also interesting.
What makes Bono different is his explanation of being a famous rock star while holding firm religious beliefs and faith without coming across as "preachy".
The book is long but not a hard read. I found Bono to be a good writer and the book is worth a read because of who Bono is, he's a fascinating man for what he does outside of music.
Each chapter is titled after one of the many U2 songs that we have all grown up listening to but they are not strictly about the songs, per say. Bono weaves tales from his childhood and upbringing in a split Protestant/Catholic family, living through unrest and car bombs in an around Dublin, dating, meeting his bandmates, rehearsing, touring, and longing for his mother Iris who passed when he was just a boy.
His earliest musical inspiration, The Ramones got him to play and write his own music. One of the most significant days that he can recall was on his 18th birthday in 1978 he would write what would turn out to be the track Out Of Control, and from there, as we say, was history.
“I was born with melodies in my head, and I was looking for a way to hear them in the world.“
For Bono, “Growing up in Ireland, it felt as if the future was always somewhere else.” He is a dreamer. He has a deep understanding and appreciation for life and when he thinks, it’s on the grandest of scales. “Everything we do, think, feel, imagine, discuss, is framed by the notion of whether our death is the end, or the beginning of something else.“ Bono has contemplated many things in life, but the one thing that he knew for sure was that “songs are my prayers”.
He’s been called by his given name Paul David Hewson, and by made up nicknames like Steinvich von Heischen, given to him by his best friend since childhood, Guggi. But the name, person, singer and humanitarian that we are all familiar with continues to walk this earth as Bono.
Top reviews from other countries
The beauty of "Surrender" lies not only in its eloquent prose but also in its ability to blend humor and touching moments seamlessly. Bono's writing is a symphony of words, painting vivid imagery that allows readers to immerse themselves in the narrative. His unique storytelling style dances between wit and profound insights, reminding us that life's complexities are best navigated with a touch of levity.
What sets "Surrender" apart is its unwavering courage to delve into the most intricate facets of existence. Bono fearlessly explores the nuances of human emotions, relationships, and the ever-evolving nature of our existence. By doing so, he masterfully triggers a cascade of new perspectives, sparking a reevaluation of our own beliefs and priorities.
The book's ability to touch the core of human experiences is a testament to Bono's exceptional talent as both a musician and a wordsmith. His exploration of surrender, a concept often misunderstood, is nothing short of revelatory. Through a tapestry of anecdotes, introspections, and life lessons, he unveils the true power that comes from letting go and embracing vulnerability.
What truly makes "Surrender" a gem is its universal appeal. Regardless of one's background, age, or beliefs, the book opens doors to uncharted territories of thought. It fosters an atmosphere of open dialogue within oneself, inviting readers to contemplate life's meaning, purpose, and the connections that bind us all.
In conclusion, "Bono's 'Surrender'" is a captivating odyssey that leaves an indelible mark on the reader's heart and intellect. It's a beautifully written exploration of life's intricacies, peppered with humor, and charged with an emotional resonance that lingers long after the final page is turned. Bono's gift for storytelling shines brilliantly, offering readers a chance to surrender to the profound wisdom hidden within these pages. This book is not just a read; it's a transformative experience that ignites new ways of thinking about life itself.