The Harrad Experiment: Special 25th Anniversary Edition with a New Afterword and Bibliography by the [Paperback]

Robert H. Rimmer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1990

A new-age 'experiment' takes place in the 1960s at Harrad College, a privately endowed and liberally run school that admits carefully selected students. This social experiment encourages premarital living arrangements and is totally committed - not mere lip-service or public-relations hype - to getting young men and women to think and act for themselves. What do they think about? Everything that interests the author, Bob Rimmer: human relations, sex, history, philosophy, anatomy, existentialism, art, music, Zen, politics - and, once more, sex. Four Harrad students record their thoughts regularly for four years. Their diaries include large chunks of college 'action', conversation, and portraits of fellow students, so the reader is swept into the lives of these young adults trying to sort out the jumbled mores of America's Sixties. Stanley Kolasukas, a bright, good-looking youth from a poor Polish family finds himself a roommate of Sheila Grove, the introspective daughter of an oil millionaire. Harry Schacht, a brilliant but ungainly medical student from an Orthodox Jewish background, lives with Beth Hillyer, a girl with enough drive to be a better doctor and enough sensuality to need many men in her life. Jack Dawes, imaginative and enthusiastic, lives with Valerie Latrobe, a dominant girl who believes she can better any man at anything. The original "Harrad Experiment" sold more than three million copies. This 25th anniversary edition includes a new epilogue describing the startling 'Harrad/Premar Solution', a fully up-to-date and annotated bibliography of books that support the daring, joyfully subversive premises outlined in Harrad, and Robert Rimmer's candid, controversial autobiography. When you have read this book, you will find yourself entertaining the question of whether a real-life Harrad Experiment could - or should - be going on somewhere today, turning out a very special group of young men and women with the potential to utterly change America's ways of living, thinking, and loving in the 21st century.

Product Details

• Paperback: 324 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books; 25 Anv edition (September 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879756233
• ISBN-13: 978-0879756239
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #943,877 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Harrad Experiment: Polyamory in action, September 26, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Harrad Experiment: Special 25th Anniversary Edition with a New Afterword and Bibliography by the (Paperback)

I first read The Harrad Experiment in 1973. I was about to leave home for college in a few days, and I wanted something to read on the journey. That notion didn't work; I got the book home and stayed up most of the night reading it. But it did work after all; I read it again on the trip, and many times since.

Bob Rimmer's writing (in Harrad, and in his other books which I read later) was a major influence on my feelings about life and love. (Perhaps getting to me at a susceptible age helped.) Harrad taught me that (to steal the words of another writer, Robert Heinlein, whose character Lazarus Long said it better than I can) "the more you love, the more you can love" and (in Rimmer's own words) that "love is laughter, too".

Harrad isn't perfect; it is in certain ways a period piece, and Bob Rimmer has the occasional sexist moment (though remarkably few for a book that came out in 1966). But it remains the best fictional introduction to polyamory (a word that didn't even exist when Harrad was written) that I have encountered.

The 25th Anniversary Edition has an extra bonus; a short autobiography of Bob Rimmer. All fans of Rimmer's work will want to read it; it's almost worth the cost of a new book, even if you already have a dogeared copy of the old Bantam edition of The Harrad Experiment. There is also an updated bibliography/reading list, so you'll actually have a chance of being able to find the books.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Oh I wish..., March 30, 2003

By 

T. Niksa (Logan, WV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Harrad Experiment: Special 25th Anniversary Edition with a New Afterword and Bibliography by the (Paperback)

I cannot mistake it for being anything but a fantasy, but one that appeals a lot to me...women who one gets to see naked at least once a day, a roommate that you are told has been computer-assigned to you on the basis of sexual compatablily, a nice isolated New England college. Such a life - would definitely be good!

I enjoyed the heck out of this in the early seventies. While not anywhere as explicit as "Literotica" or other writings on the web, back then it was pretty hot stuff, particularly for someone who had lazy intellectual pretensions. The scene where two of our heroes/heroines have a long discussion of the history of polyamory while continuously coupled was especially pleasing.

Since then, I've grown up some; I've realized the war between advocates of prohibitions on sexual conduct, usually backed by the established religions, on the one hand, and the advocates of sexual license on the other, is never going to be won by one side or the other. Although not religious myself, I am mature enough to know that neither side is entirely right or wrong, and the advocacy of complete sexual license is often just one other strategy for guys to try and cut themselves out as big a slice of the female gene pie as possible. Heck, it sure worked for Rasputin and Charles Manson. I've also noticed the participants in the experiment are a cross-section of a '60s student body - white, middle class, without physical handicaps, and secure in their futures. Except for the young Indian girl who taken out of poverty is quickly converted to the "new American way." The earlier writer who said this reflected cultural arrogance is on the mark here.

Still, I still keep my copy around, reread it from time to time, and sure wish I could get dormed with someone like Sheila.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Controversial" depends on the times, I guess, July 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Harrad Experiment: Special 25th Anniversary Edition with a New Afterword and Bibliography by the (Paperback)

When this book first came out in the mid 'Sixties, it could only be ordered by mail through an ad in Playboy. Three years later, I found it in stores as a Bantam paperback. Symbolic of the fact that if the Sexual Revolution had been a car, it would have had a 32-valve Northstar engine, but no ABS braking. This book was clearly aimed at the undergrad of my day, when college administrations held clear-cut in loco parentis authority, and the directors of girls' dorms were called "house mothers". You were taking a big chance going on a "panty raid" back then. In retrospect, I'm not really sure that today's way is necessarily "more enlightened". But you couldn't tell us that back then, with our hormones in overdrive! As a story, though, this one's short on credibilty. It's told through "diaries" of four students attending a privately-endowed "auxiliary college". Students still attend classes at recognized schools, but also attend Harrad's "human values" seminars, and live with a roommate of the opposite sex. One of the boys is a BMOC type whose sex appeal already gets him places--what's he doing here? His roomie is a shy rich girl with a low opinion of her own sex appeal. Then there's a school nerd who's paired off with this "prom queen" type who he'd be afraid to even say hi to back home, much less ask her out. But where are the prom queens who'll only date the football jocks? How about those jocks who only date the cheerleaders? Hel-lo? Unlike in the "Nerds" films, the socially inept don't get even, they remain an underclass. Rimmer is about as subtle as a Richter-scale quake when he implies that these kids' main problem is "society" and "the establishment". He forgets that, in the real world, young adults also have their peers to contend with. In the course of the story, he has his protagonists reading a lot of writings from philosophers and sociologists who are selectively "other-worldly" in their thinking. I think he should have also had them reading up on Japanese Moritist psychology, which among other things, teaches that it's counterproductive to obsess over a lot of "shoulds" and "oughts", and far healthier to come to terms with the world as it actually is.