There is a saying that any publicity is good publicity. If the fuss raised around Shoaib Akhtar’s recently released autobiography was meant to enhance book sales, it certainly worked. After the book had dominated a few news cycles, an inside source at HarperCollins India, the book’s publishers, confirmed that orders had sky-rocketed. In Karachi, an official at the city’s leading bookstore chain revealed that their phones had been ringing off the hook. “We are receiving over a hundred calls a day,” he noted with some exasperation.

Whether the whole drama was a marketing ploy is known only to Shoaib himself. He did rig his book with cleverly laid irritants that were bound to create furore. Confessions of ball-tampering, pot-shots at iconic figures, and brazen recollections of a partying lifestyle will never sit lightly with any readership, least of all one from India and Pakistan. But the narrator of this book sounds no different from the Shoaib that we have known and grown accustomed to over all these years. Quite possibly, the abrasiveness of Shoaib the writer is nothing more than Shoaib being his usual brash self, with the climbing sales being an unintended though welcome bonus.

The book has a good deal more to offer than it has so far been given credit for. Shoaib’s life story is a quintessentially Pakistani drama originating from a struggling locality in Rawalpindi and stretching across the complexities of Pakistan’s cricket and society to, eventually, the great cricket centres of the world. He was born into a family eking out a life at the edge. Uncertain and adrift, he wandered aimlessly through childhood and angrily through adolescence. Despite their difficulties, his parents did their best to impart upright values and insisted on education. In college, Shoaib discovered cricket and became possessed with bowling fast. After getting inspiration from Imran Khan, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, he never looked back.

Not for nothing did he title his book Controversially yours. There are tales in it of hedonism, egotism, drama and deceit. It carries more than enough levity to make you laugh out loud, and more than enough pathos to make your eyes wet. There are times when Shoaib shouts breathlessly and infects the reader with his frustration. At other moments, he is persuasive and cajoling, seeking an end to his public curse of being misrepresented and misunderstood.

One wishes he had been more introspective about the cricket itself. Yes, he does explain his relatively underachieving international record by coming clean about his troubled knees, chronically damaged from years of uninterrupted and hectic running. But he glosses over all the good parts of his career, the fearsome spells and the dramatic wickets, where he could have truly entertained the committed reader by recreating scenarios from within the bowler’s head.

For example, his famous first-ball dismissal of Sachin Tendulkar (bowled middle-stump) in the Kolkata Test of 1998 is described the way a journalist would, in the manner of an informed observer. But this was the event that catapulted Shoaib to immediate world attention, and readers would be justified in expecting a more insightful treatment. He has spoken more engagingly about this moment in television interviews than he did in his book.

There are also minor shortcomings in the book’s production, which has allowed typos and misspellings to creep in. At one point fast bowler Mohammad Asif is called Asif Mohammad, and opening batsman Saeed Anwar is written as Anwar Saeed. In a photo caption, middle-order batsman Mohammad Yousuf is wrongly named. Occasionally a full-stop appears unexpectedly, and one grates at hyphens showing up where they shouldn’t be.

Still, the package overall is highly enjoyable, entertaining and even moving. It is easy to be critical of this book, but the intelligent reader approaching it with an open mind will be well rewarded. A great deal of material has been covered, and Shoaib’s Indian co-author Anshu Dogra has taken care and effort to weave it into a coherent and flowing narrative. The choice of an Indian publisher may raise eyebrows, but this is a sensible strategic move given the lack of international publishing options within Pakistan.

Perhaps the most commendable aspect of Shoaib’s book is its very appearance. The publication of an autobiography is a notable act anywhere in the cricket world, but in Pakistan it is even more so because of the sparse written output of our cricketers. Famous names whose stories fans are dying to read—such as Waqar Younis, Inzamamul Haq, Abdul Qadir, Asif Iqbal, Majid Khan, and Sarfaraz Nawaz, in addition to several others—have still not penned anything of lasting value. In other cases—notably the efforts by Wasim Akram and Zaheer Abbas—the books appeared too early in the player’s career and, co-authored by British scribes, ended up being mostly about life in country cricket and failed to capture their Pakistani essence.Throughout his career, Shoaib was criticised for lack of discipline, but he has certainly shown great discipline in producing a book with impact. Hopefully this will inspire our other cricket stars to follow suit.