Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16103 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

Vogue
`The fairy godmother doling out advice is the eminently stylish Lucia van der Post, who manages never to patronise her reader or -- as other guides do -- write as though she has been lobotomised . . . Her tips on simple but treacherously difficult things like how best to wear black are vital reading'

Easy Living
`With no-nonsense bravura she filters out the rubbish and highlights the ways to age glamorously, dress chicly, entertain fabulously, be a supportive and warm friend, mother and wife . . . Insightful, practical and poignant'

Eve
`Poised, elegant and idiosyncratic, Lucia is the grande dame of style . . . Good advice was never so glam'

Customer Reviews

Not what it says on the cover
From the title I would have expected to read about some valuable life lessons, or at the very least some wise words. Disappointingly, nothing whatsoever of that nature could be found between the beautifully illustrated covers.
Basically a glorified shopping guide for the very well to do, Lucia Van Der Post comes across as shallow, snobbish and clueless.
Statements like "It is almost always the woman who benefits most from a marriage" in her tiny section on marriage left me feeling incredulous at this womans extraordinary naivety and lack of insight.

Lessons in how to live if you are extremely wealthy
This book was disappointing in that instead of being lessons on grace and elegance it was more about how to spend tons of cash to appear graceful and elegant. It seemed more like a glorified directory to the most expensive ways to spend your money. Only for the seriously wealthy.

How to be Lucia Van Der Post
It's not a bad book, I happily read it through in a few sittings, but my jaw did drop occasionally. Like at the section on presents that seems to start at around the £500 mark and go up to splashing half a billion on a private island for a weekend!

For a book supposedly about things one's mother should tell one, I was also suprised at the vast amount on being a grandmother, and yet the brisk line about being a mother.

And there are too many sections where "cheap treats" are listed as things the rest of us save up for. And shops listed as "budget" that I find beyond mine!

I enjoyed the prose, but I think she would have been better writing an autobiography about a rich and glamorous life the rest of us can only dream of. Instead we have a how-to book making assumptions that the rest of us only lack the glamour, not the vast riches necessary to attain it.