“Surrender” is the story of Bono’s remarkable life, written, narrated and illustrated by himself, and structured around 40 U2 songs. A book by a combative artist, who discovers that he is at his best when he learns to surrender. The book is episodic and ironic, introspective and illuminating: telling of himself with candour and humour, Bono shows us the challenges he faced, his friends, his family and his faith that have supported and shaped him.
Bono was born in Dublin to a Catholic father and a Protestant mother at a time of increasing violence in Ireland. The loss of his mother at the age of fourteen opened a empty space that would lead him to look for a family. As a child, he felt mediocre, but his life would show that no one is really mediocre. In the book we discover his creativity but also his difficulties in dealing with anger, a feeling that we find in his songs about love and nonviolence. In forty years of his career, Bono has become from a simple part-time activist to a full-time driving force in the struggle to cancel the debt of poor Countries. Two are the most important themes he addresses in the book: the waste of human potential and the faith, a “quiet little voice” that the artist feels especially in his marriage, in his music and in the fight against extreme poverty. ” Surrender” is above all a love story dedicated to his wife Ali, whom Bono dated out for the first time during the same week U2 had played together for the first time.
Our adult readers have seen a lot of sequences of the audiobook, listened to several songs and appreciated the story of this great artist and writer but also the beauty of the lyrics, so full of energy and positive messages.
