Unforgettable Fire: Past, Present and Future--The Definitive Biography of U2

Hailed as the ""Band of the '80s'' by Rolling Stone magazine, U2 is known for sinewy music and haunting lyrics. By contrast, this biography by Irish writer Dunphy, written with the band's cooperation, is bloated and boring. Filling some 300 pages, Dunphy offers overly detailed sketches of the band members (Paul ``Bono'' Hewsom ``was a cranky baby''), a drawn-out account of how the budding rock musicians met, dime-store psychoanalysis and many obscenities. In the second half of the book, Dunphy presents instructive comments on U2's music (for example, the album Unforgettable Fire was inspired by drawings by survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings), but, overall, he focuses too much on the band members and not enough on their musical message. And one questions his claim that U2 did not censor any materialthere's scarcely a critical word in the book. Photos. (March)