Splendid Isolation: The Jekyll Island Millionaires' Club 1888-1942

We are from South Africa and visited Jekyll Island to watch our daughter in a golf tournament. We had never heard of the place before. We were instantly captivated by the history - it oozes out of the soil! I wanted to know more as our time there was too short. I found this book online. It fascinated me from the start to finish. I loved the way it was written through varooms workers eyes. It was very informative and answered all my feelings of what and why it all happened. I think it would make for a wonderful TV series - much like Downton Abbey! I do not think a foreigner who has not visited the island would have the same enthusiasm as I had for the book. I still feel like reading more stories on this fascinating time and place in Jekyll's history. I can recommend it to anyone interested in Jekyll Island and its stories of its alluring past.

I am enjoying this book very much. It is well written and extremely interesting, a secluded segment of integral American history. Four recollections of life in this membership club and island. (A very unique lifestyle to this Oregon Trail descendant, where my ancestors worked the land, built cabin homes in the 1850s, and did not have servants.) This book is a delightful peek into the extraordinary lives of the Old Eastern Elite, a world where people knew their math fractions, spoke proper English grammar and shared courteous manners. I can hardly wait to visit there next year!

We were heading to Florida and needed to stop for the night. Once we were there we got really interested in the story of Jekyll Island. This book was very interesting & easy reading. It made me more curious about more history of the Island. I would recommend this book for readers who like history with a personal side to it.

I have been aware of this splendid book since its publication date but postponed buying it because I thought it would be dull reading about a bunch of long dead millionaires who built a private retreat on Jekyll Island more than a hundred years ago. I was dead wrong! This is a well written book by an award winning author whose attention to detail makes it not only a delightful book to read but a noteworthy historical textbook which should be required reading for any serious student of American History and Southern History in particular. You will discover, for instance, that this same group of millionaires are the folk whose vision included the creation of a privately owned central bank - our present day the Federal Reserve System - and it all took place at the Jekyll Island Club. Splendid Isolation should be a permanent part of every public library in America as well as a excellent addition to your own collection.

I thought this book was written from a very creative point of view (or rather, multiple points of view). There were quite a few quotes/events brought up that I had not read anywhere else. For someone extremely interested in the subject of Jekyll Island, this is a must read. However, for other readers I'd imagine it would be a little dry and slowly paced. Although this is a topic I have a lot of interest in, the book also takes a few long detours into dialogue about watching turtles laying eggs on the beach, golfing, and a few other activities which were generic enough to take place just about anywhere. Also, I was a bit disappointed about how some of the more notable events were explained away in a sentence or two. Specifically, the two or three brief sentences which mentioned the closing of the island in 1942. Passing over such a big event (the end of the 50+ year club) was extremely anticlimactic. I'd still highly recommend this book to anyone with even a passing interest in the Jekyll Island Hunt Club. While perhaps to a fault, this book is also a bit easier to read than others, since it takes a historical novel approach, as opposed to being a reference book.

Artfully composed historical novel tells the story about famed Jekyll Island Club trough the eyes of its select members and staff. Well researched and beautifully narrated, it makes for an enjoyable read especially when coupled with a visit to the magical Jekyll Island and Georgia's Golden Isles. Warmly recommended!

This book covers the whole history of the Jekyll Island Club in a well thought out fashion. There is a lot about the creation of the club and the running of it, with enough about some of the members to add spice. Our family first visited Jekyll in the late sixties; just before the clubhouse which had been turned into a hotel close down. It was during a tropical storm and the halls were lined with buckets catching the water from the leaking roof. The member cottages were falling into ruin, and were open to anybody to poke around. I heard that much of the original furnishings were carried off and there was nobody to protect the place. Today when you go to Jekyll you can get a feel for what it must have been like in its heyday, things are largely restored and manicured- it is looking more like a Millionaires Club. This is the scene of the first trans-continental telephone call, the place where the members sketched out the origins of the Federal Reserve Bank, where the richest of the rich came to spend their winters. Its story is very interesting, and this book does it justice.

I guess this is really fiction because it is dialoge of persons that worked for the Jekyll Island Club. But it is written with so much factual information. So it is non-fiction that reads like a novel. Well researched with some actual photos of those wonderful men and women of the Gilded Age! As a Georgian and a fan of Jekyll Island, this book was a great find. I recommend it to anyone who is from Georgia, who visits Jekyll Island occasionally, who loves history, and enjoys reading!