fun book with loads of great shots. Has shots of my hometown even making it tastier to me.

I waited for this book and it finally went on sale, but what a disappointment it was. It is just big pictures. I thought there would be more of a story with each picture, but nothing. Don't waste your money.

A superb coffee-table photo book that should be in every home that can boast an in-ground swimming pool. While the images show American and European jetsetters at poolside during the 1950s to the 1990s, it does inspire us slugs in the middle class to work to achieve that oh-so ethereal (in-ground) swimming-pool lifestyle that typifies having "made it" in the modern age. Pour yourself a martini and then sit by the pool as you enjoy this book. You don't have to just dream it. Go ahead--live it. Just ask the late actor Burt Lancaster's character in the 1968 film "The Swimmer". Then you, too, can swim home.

Slim Aarons was given rare access to the super rich and he captures them perfectly in all their shallow excess: all vacuous looks and gorgeous scenery. His images are famous of course, as much for the famous people as for the art of photography. This book is not to the level of, The Place in the Sun, mainly because, as that book was comprehensive the one is..well..about being poolside with the Euro trash and American trust fund baby's. Personally, I kinda like the voyeurism his images provide, and it makes you feel glad, even with all their wealth and jet setting lives, that you are not one of them; to look back on your life and know that all you did was spend money and jet set would be pathetic indeed. Overall, good book, interesting text and quality images, but the other book on Aarons is better.

This book is unfortunately not as enjoyable as other collections of his photos and really quite boring. Whereas Once Upon A Time and A Place In The Sun evoked an era and gave you either a voyeuristic peek into the lives of old money,some great photography, or both, this book gives very little of either. I was hoping for equally compelling and thematically consistent imagery here but unfortunately the title misses the mark. I wish the editor/publisher had been more discriminating.

Poolside is a great collection. I am an enormous Aarons fan and have his two other currently in-print books. Poolside shows some of the once great, but now little known members of an international society which is now all but gone. Doinnes, gold-diggers, and scions comingle in glamorous pools wearing Cartier watches, gold bracelets, and the classic '70s look, the gold chain softly nestled in a bed of chest hair. Hermes beach towels and Vuitton bags hold vigle under umbrella tables, visited by bowtie clad waiters refreshing drinks for little sister as she flirts with a countryless prince. Whats keeps his work from being complete camp, is that it was all real. People trully lived these lives. They weren't acting for a camera, they were caught in that moment when they were just happening to be having cocktails in Jamaica with Mrs. so-and-so.
My only complaint is that many of the pic.s have been previously published in prior collections and others just don't have all the impact and roundness held in the selections Aarons made for the works published in his lifetime.
There are many "society" photographers. None are Slim Aarons.