Why Bono’s second career is the reason to keep reading his book
From the deal he did with George W. Bush to what he learned when Mikhail Gorbachev came over for Sunday dinner, the U2 frontman’s memoir is a rambling, fascinating read.
In the book that journalist Bill Flanagan wrote after embedding with the Irish rock band U2 during their most fertile creative period, 1995’s U2 at the End of the World, Flanagan told a joke about why James Joyce had to leave Ireland to write Ulysses: Because if he’d stayed he would’ve talked it.
I found myself recalling this fragment of a book I read a quarter-century ago as I made my way through Bono’s Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, the fascinatingly (and occasionally maddeningly) discursive memoir of the lightning-rod U2 frontman, a 62-year-old rock star almost as infamous for his talking as he is famous for his singing.
