Other than George Washington, no other American leader was present at more turning points in the early years of the Republic than Alexander Hamilton. He was a rarity among the founding fathers: an outstanding thinker as well as excellent government visionary and executive. In his well-researched Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow contends that Hamilton was "the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a deeper and more lasting impact than many who did."

Chernow received the National Book Award for The House of Morgan and is also the author of the best-selling Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. In Alexander Hamilton, we follow the subject from his illegitimate birth—which probably took place on the island of Nevis in the West Indies—to his roles as a close aide to General Washington and a military hero during the Revolution. He later became a member of the Constitutional Convention; the force behind the literary and political masterpiece The Federalist; the first secretary of the Treasury; and a fierce political polemicist whose writings helped define the political agenda during the Washington and Adams administrations.

Alexander Hamilton is a balanced portrait of the man and his many contradictions. For example, Chernow describes him as a man whose strong belief in the potential of America stood in stark contrast to his pessimistic views of human nature. Among the founders, it was Hamilton who "probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who could guide them." Influenced by his contact with slaves in the West Indies, he was a staunch abolitionist.

There is much more, including Hamilton’s role in establishing an American foreign policy, his part in the birth of the two-party system and of course, his death at age 49 in his famous duel with Aaron Burr. Admirers of David McCullough’s John Adams or Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin will thoroughly enjoy this excellent book.

On the surface, there appear to be few similarities between Sir Francis Drake (c. 1541-1596) and Oscar Hartzell (1876-1943). One was the swashbuckling confidant of Queen Elizabeth, the other a cigar-chomping farmer’s son from Illinois. But, as Richard Rayner shows in his new book Drake’s Fortune, both men were adventurers with big dreams. Drake realized his dream by plundering and bringing back to England shiploads of riches Spain had extracted from the New World. Hartzell made his fortune by convincing thousands of American dupes most of them in his native Midwest that he held the key to Drake’s supposedly vast estate. All one needed to do to share in this multi-billion-dollar booty, Hartzell told his multitude of marks, was to invest in the minimal costs of settling the estate. Of course, this might take some time.

To the con artist, as Rayner proves, the crucial element of business isn’t simply that a sucker is born every minute, but that the sucker is likely to remain one, even in the face of the most obvious contradictory evidence. Hartzell, who was initially a victim of the Drake scam, soon turned the tables and took over the game. From 1915 until months after he was convicted of the fraud in 1933 in Sioux City, Iowa, he bilked millions from the credulous. Even during the bleak early days of the Depression, he kept the money flowing in.

Because the mythical Drake fortune resided in England, Hartzell spent most of his productive years in London, putting on airs, taking mistresses and generally living the good life. Periodically, he made progress reports to the folks back home, assuring them that they would soon be rich. His pitch was so persuasive that even when he was deported from England and taken back to America to stand trial, crowds of the very people he had cheated continued to believe him and treated him like royalty. Hartzell went to prison in 1935 and died there of cancer in 1943.

While Rayner’s depiction of the roguish Hartzell is fascinating, the book’s greater achievement is showing that gullibility is humanity’s most common and renewable resource.

Eustace Conway is handsome, brilliant, charismatic. He owns his own valley in North Carolina. He’s a trendsetter and a newsmaker. He even has a conscience. So why can’t he keep a girlfriend? You’ll find out in Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man, an intriguing profile of the 21st century’s answer to Davy Crockett. Frontiers aren’t for everyone, though they linger in America’s collective imagination. Boys these days are more likely to test their manhood in a mall than in the woods. Into this rather sad picture of diminished horizons enters Eustace Conway. Conway leaves his comfortable suburban home at 17 and disappears into the woods, only to reappear as a sort of eco-Messiah, with a message that yes, there is a better way to live than on the grid prescribed by modern-day America.

Soon Conway is hiking the Appalachian Trail, crossing the United States on horseback and buying up unspoiled land in North Carolina to establish his utopian Turtle Island, a sanctuary where visitors and apprentices can study Conway’s alternative lifestyle one that’s closely based on Native American traditions of hunting, gathering and the resourceful use of natural materials.

The word "biography" has such a dusty sound to it that I hesitate to apply it to this book. Gilbert does, indeed, chronicle Conway’s life from beginning to end, but her account is more than fact; it’s great entertainment. Gilbert is a gifted storyteller. She also has the perfect subject: a 21st century pioneer with the wanderlust of Deerslayer and the shrewdness of Daniel Boone. Through Conway, Gilbert examines the difficulty of coming into an American manhood in a world without frontiers. While she’s at it, she chronicles the history of utopias in America both those that succeeded and those that failed. Gilbert doesn’t mince Conway’s shortcomings a difficult relationship with his father; an inflexibility that makes lasting relationships with women impossible; his phenomenal workaholism; his Messianic complex. Even Conway’s flaws are part of the picture Gilbert’s portrait of an American man of destiny, perhaps the last.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.