U2 frontman Bono has announced a Nov. 1 release date for his memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, which 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,” according to publisher Alfred A. Knopf.
The book is so named because each chapter is titled after a different U2 song, and Bono has also created 40 original drawings for the project. In an audio excerpt posted today, Bono discusses how the music of The Ramones changed his life around the time he turned 18, just as he began thinking seriously about a career in the arts.
“When I started to write this book, I was hoping to draw in detail what I’d previously only sketched in songs,” Bono said in a statement. “The people, places and possibilities in my life. Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me. Growing up in Ireland in the ‘70s 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.”
Expect Surrender to detail Bono’s early life in Dublin, the death of his mother when he was 14, U2’s ‘80s-era ascent into becoming the biggest rock band in the world and the artist’s tireless activism in the fight against global poverty and AIDS. The book, in both hardcover and audio form, can be pre-ordered here.
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As previously reported, Bono and U2 guitarist The Edge accepted an invitation from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and played a short set on Sunday in a Kyiv bomb shelter that was once a subway station.
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