A Voice for Independent Authors

“You can kill a book quicker by your silence than by a bad review.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

REVIEWING TODAY: SAME RED DIRT BY PAT CONRAD

Pat Conrad’s book, Same Red Dirt, is billed as A Comical Memoir. Admittedly, many unusual events occur in Mr. Conrad’s young adulthood, initially centered around his unique and constantly surprising experiences working in an Australian mental institution. Whether the reader finds these experiences to be comical or not depends largely on the said reader’s level of compassion. The author prefers to take a more dispassionate approach to the condition of the troubled inmates, perhaps reflecting the general attitude of earlier times or simply the as-yet undeveloped nature of his own immaturity, but now, at an older age, he relates his misadventures with a rather sardonic and perhaps confessional wryness meant to amuse the listener. In any case, the remembrances alone are most unique and fascinating and revealing of a strange time in the unsophisticated treatment of the mentally ill.

From the madhouse, Pat Conrad proceeds on motorbike into the badlands of Australia to garner more grist for his literary mill called, Same Red Dirt. Some kind of strange cloud seems to follow young Conrad, or perhaps his odd adventures are simply consequences of his own strange behaviors – smoking unprepared opium pods to replace a depleted pot supply, biking dangerous Tasmanian night roads with little protection, living what he considers the hippie life, but disdainful of his draft-dodging friend. The older Conrad is most candid about these youthful indiscretions, treating everything he experienced as something rather muse-worthy, if not flattering to his choices, and therein he seems to find great humor. Good to be able to laugh at one’s self, and by so doing, to engage and entertain others.