Few autobiographies are as suited to audio as Surrender, in which U2 frontman Bono reflects on nearly 50 years in music using his band’s songs as his guide. The book opens with the singer – who narrates – undergoing heart surgery to deal with a blister on his aorta that was ready to “put me in the next life faster than I can make an emergency call”.
He looks back on his life, describing the death of his mother from a stroke when he was 14 – he believes it was this that led him to become a performer, seeking the love from audiences that he had lost – and his troubled relationship with his emotionally distant, opera-loving father. Surrender also plots the formation of U2 with a group of school friends and the band’s ascent into a stadium-conquering behemoth. As Bono’s world-saving impulses kick in, he acknowledges the hubris of Band Aid and of leaving his young family for long periods to rescue children on the other side of the world. He also dearly wishes he hadn’t inflicted U2’s music on millions of iTunes users without their consent: “We didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town,” he notes.
