Paul Hewson, stage name Bono, is the lead singer of the Irish punk rock band U2.  Bono released his personal narrative late last year titled “Surrender: 40 songs one story.”  

The book, as the name suggests, is split into 40 chapters each named after a U2 song and discussing how each song came about and what it meant to his life.

Throughout the book Bono weaves in anecdotes about his life that relate back to the song that the chapter is titled after.

Bono splits these 40 chapters into 3 distinct sections with different focuses.   

The first section was mostly anecdotes about his early life and the early albums with the band.  This is the section where he talks about the important people that he met when he was young in Ireland such as his mother Iris who died when he was 13, his wife Ali, the three other members of U2 and his long time best friend Gavin Friday; lead singer of the Virgin Prunes.

The second section is about what he did away from music and takes place after the release of the U2 album “War” in 1983.  Throughout this section he talks about what he’s done for charity with projects such as RED and ONE.  He also talks about the people he met through stardom such as Michael Hutchence, the late lead singer of INXS who took his own life in 1997.

The third section of the book talks about his life now and his continued relationship with music, the band, his family, performance and religion.  In this section he speaks extensively on his views on his life, humanity and his relation to his music and he uses more recent anecdotes to explain it.

Throughout the entire book he talks about the people in his life and the experiences and emotions he shared with them.  His mother Iris, his wife Ali and his best friend Gavin came up in almost every chapter of the book.  As much as this was a book about his experiences and life, it was a love letter to Ali, an I miss you to iris and a thank you to Gavin.

The book being titled “Surrender” is very emblematic of the themes he touches on heavily in the later chapters of the book.  He beautifully and effectively weaves and develops his themes through an experienced and nuanced understanding of moments throughout his life.

I listened to the book as an audiobook that I borrowed digitally from the St. Louis Public Library.  The audio book was narrated by Bono and because of it, I was able to gain a better understanding of the emotions that he was attempting to get across in the book. 

Although it took me about 10 hours to complete the book, I found myself riveted the entire time.  As a personal fan of U2, listening to this book gave me a better understanding of what some of my favorite songs meant to the author and appreciation for the themes he developed through the U2 albums.  He also used the songs in the audiobook as transitions and lines between paragraphs in order to give the reader a deeper understanding of the songs and what they meant to him.  That was something that I thought was a beautiful touch.

Bono was able to create extremely powerful and stunning moments throughout the book that made me pause the book just to process them.  This is a feat that no other personal narrative author has gotten me to do and made for the highlights of the book for me.  My favorite moment in the book is when he is talking about the band writing the song “I Will Follow” and he stands in front of the rest of the band and states what it’s about.  It is so incredibly beautiful and powerful yet painful.  I highly recommend reading that passage on page 73, then listening to the song right after.

The second part of the book felt a lot slower compared to the first and third parts, still those stories were important to his life and the music he wrote, providing great moments for the book as whole.  The complaint that I have about this section is that it feels more like it’s about his philanthropy, than it is about the music, his connection with it, and the relationships with the people he spoke about so often in the first section.

The third part was quite an interesting listen.  As it was about his life so far through a more experienced lens, the anecdotes were mostly about cherished moments with his family and friends that I found to be beautiful.  He would then trail off from these anecdotes into stunning prose detailing what he has thus far learned and what he now believes.  Religion came up quite a bit more in this section of the book, but he never came off as preachy, which I found to strengthen the book and its themes.

Overall, I absolutely loved the book. For a genre that I usually am not very drawn to, Bono was able to amazingly develop beautiful themes, create stunningly powerful moments and give me a new perspective on the U2 albums that I’ve listened to for my entire life.

This book was written by musician Bono, was published by Alfred A. Knopf which is owned by Penguin Classics and sells in most major bookstores for $20. You can also pick up a copy in the school library.