Leader: In Praise Of... Steve Waugh

With their tunnel vision and indifference to the wider world, sports autobiographies mostly prove light and unrewarding reading.

So the prospect of an 800-page sports autobiography will strike normal people as a book too far. But Steve Waugh's Out of My Comfort Zone defies such preconceptions.

Australia's all-conquering former cricket captain rarely did anything badly on the field; he was a record breaker with the bat who captained his country in 57 tests of which he won 41 and lost only nine. But he writes a winning story too.

His book is unusual for reasons other than its length. It is hard to think of a sportsman before Mr Waugh who has persuaded his wife to write a chapter describing the glittering career as seen from the viewpoint of the family at home.

Meanwhile, woven into the narrative of Mr Waugh's cricket career, there is the best account of captaincy - and perhaps of leadership in a wider sense - in any cricket book since Mike Brearley's a generation ago. Yet Mr Waugh's real subject is that of a man growing into a fuller appreciation of adulthood than most sports stars achieve.

The comfort zone of the title is the world of sports, so the book, as this implies, describes how Mr Waugh found his way to a deeper understanding of life beyond the boundary. Its central theme is not his many Ashes triumphs but his growing love affair with India, and of the Calcutta leprosy sufferers on whom his private charitable work now centres.

Mr Waugh was a star on the pitch. Now he is a star on the page.