The Premar Experiments [Paperback]

Robert H. Rimmer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 1999

After Robert Rimmers The Harrad Experiment there is just one way to go all the way! Harrad College has decided to expand its famous experiment. Its program of sexual liberation is to be pushed to the most far-out boundaries of freedom. Even more intriguing, the participants are to include as great a range of human beings, male and female, as possible, and they are to be coupled in every conceivable way.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

In the sixties and early seventies The Harrad Experiment and Proposition 31 became watchwords for the "hippie generation". As millions of students on campuses across the country read and talked about his books, little did they know, their hero was well past thirty.Bob started writing early in life. As a high school student in Massachusetts in the 1930s, he wrote articles for, as well as helped print and distribute, a small local magazine entitled Boy's Pal. He graduated from Bates College with a multi-discipline degree in English, Psychology and Philosophy and later obtained an MBA from Harvard. His life has been an eventful one. His military service during and after World War II included both at-home and overseas assignments. After his enlistment was up, Rimmer returned to the US and took a position in the family printing business. He spent the next twenty-five years of his life working, raising a family, and collecting his life experiences and formulating them into what would later become events and characters in his many novels.His first two novels, The Rebellion of Yale Marratt and That Girl from Boston, were written before 1960 and were considered much too controversial to publish. However, after years of mail-order sales through a small publisher in California, Rimmer's The Harrad Experiment was published by Bantam in 1967 and was finally available to a wide audience. Within a year over a million copies had been sold. More novels followed, including Proposition 31. All of these novels explored alternatives to traditional relationships and sexuality, subjects very much at the forefront of the public's interest in the 1970's. Now in his eighties, Bob Rimmer, always in the vanguard in his advocacy of alternatives to the traditional monogamous relationship, becomes one of the first authors to recognize the potential of the Internet to bring his books to millions of new readers. With fourteen novels to his credit and still going strong, this author has not only bro

Product Details

• Paperback: 444 pages
• Publisher: IUniverse (January 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583480951
• ISBN-13: 978-1583480953
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,642,268 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A "Harrad" sidestream story, July 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Premar Experiments (Paperback)

I hate to do this, but I'm going to have to go incognito here, for reasons you'll soon come to understand. It's been implied by earlier reviewers here, but it looks like more working-class grunts than me read "Harrad" and wondered "what about us?" and some of that got back to Robert Rimmer. Me, I've looked at it, as Joni Mitchell put it; "from both sides now"--I read "Harrad" as an undergrad, flunked out, and wound up in the blue-collar sector where his "Premar" protagonists live. Among other couples, Rimmer pairs off Samantha, a black gang-rape victim during her adolescence--with Jules, a gentle-natured Jewish boy--and we're supposed to believe that tenderness and love is all it takes. Errnnngh! Wrong answer. Twenty-five years ago, I was involved with a survivor of a number of dysfunctional relationships, including a marriage. Rape was not involved, but where she didn't get slapped around, she didn't get much respect, either. Her initial reaction to how different I was from my predecessors in her life was rhapsodic, but eventually she came to see it as an exploitable weakness. Experience apparently taught her certain lessons along the lines of Goethe's old saying; "One must the hammer or the anvil be." That's what happens when life teaches you to keep your mental dukes up, guarding your heart the way a boxer does his chin. Needless to say, we didn't last--I'm a working stiff, not a therapist. So, as a Gen-X pop song once put it; "Baby, sometimes love just ain't enough." In the five Rimmer books I've read, he implies that it is. I used to be into that kind of wishful thinking. I don't know whether to be glad that I'm not that much of a fool anymore, or to wish that my younger self, in concert with Bob Rimmer, had been right.

2 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Trite Social Engineering--Shouldn't Have Any Stars At All!!, May 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Premar Experiments (Paperback)

Once again, Robert Rimmer has presented the world with a ridiculous vision of social engineering. This time he's apparently decided that the vision of his _Harrad Experiment_ was elitist, and revised it to include greater "diversity." Elitist it certainly was, but the "Premar" vision is no improvement. Including affirmative action quotas and an outreach to less intellectual individuals does not change the fact that Rimmer's ideals are as fiercely intolerant as ever of the beliefs held by the vast majority of human beings.

Quite simply put, Rimmer is incapable of understanding that most people like traditional family structures and the comforts of their own heritage. Social engineering intended to turn everyone into members of the same amorphous mass, holding the same amoral individualist "values," is fundamentally opposed to diversity. True diversity is about cultures and ways of life, not skin colour or a few cute cosmetic details of dress or taste. "Liberals" like Rimmer (actually closer to Communists or Fascists) are apparently incapable of understanding this, and thus they continue to spout the same tired garbage that they did in the sixties and seventies, the same decades that created most of the social problems America is saddled with today.

While American institutions, most definitely including the universities, are in drastic need of revitalisation and renewal, Rimmer's idiotic proposals are not the answer, as they are simply variants on the same themes which have led to the current nadir. We need more respect for true difference, in the context of tradition, not a fales idolisation of superficial distinctions combined with rejection of true ones. We need greater academic rigour, not a further dumbing down to accomodate everyone with a "C average" in high school (in some American high schools this means the student is not even literate!). We need a strengthening of all relationships, not a promotion of casual promiscuity. While it is indeed possible that the strengthened family of the ideal future West--a West of peoples, not ideologies, of regions, not states, of friendship and honour, not bureaucracy and legalism--may include polyfidelity as an optional structure for married life, Rimmer's notion of the "swinging" lifestyle will never promote anything but a vile and vulgar, shallow and narcissistic, crude and unloving worldview. Love and respect for all may be an ideal, but it is only counterfeited by the shallow lack of special regard for any which is promoted by Rimmer and his ilk.

We've had enough social engineering in the West over the past hundred years or so. It's left us with deracinated masses and effete elites, impoverished cultures, unstable societies, and a host of other problems. Let's leave this garbage behind as we move into the twenty-first century, and instead affirm traditional values of freedom and honour, loyalty, piety, and duty. Rimmer's books belong on the same dustheap as the Communist, Capitalist, and Fascist ideologies that have turned this century into a mindless wreck.