“This is a story of America,” Martha MacCallum writes in the author’s note to The Book of Valor: America’s Story of Survival, Gallantry & Grace. “It is one thread woven from our Pilgrim heritage in Plymouth to a World War II triple ace in the skies over Berlin; to a rescue hero in Vietnam to the burning World Trade Center towers to the treacherous battle of Afghanistan.”
One thread. It’s a storyteller’s phrase, and she chose it with care. The book, out from HarperCollins on Nov. 10, doesn’t line its heroes up like stone sentinels in a park. It tells one American story that passes from one generation to the next, and she lets the people who were there tell it.
Fear runs through all these stories. Every person in the book feels it: the women stepping off the Mayflower into a New England winter, a young pilot climbing into the sky over Berlin, a medevac pilot descending through fog and enemy fire in Vietnam, a 24-year-old equities trader climbing back up into the smoke of the south tower. None of them is fearless, and MacCallum never pretends they are. Her argument is that fear, faced honestly, can be useful. It can push a person past what they believed they could do, and in that moment, they learn what they’re really capable of. Valor, in her telling, is not the absence of fear. It’s what fear can drive us to discover about ourselves.
Her decision to let witnesses tell those stories grew out of the research. While she was working on the early chapters, she explains, a witness kept emerging from the record: someone who was present, close enough to see what happened, and able to tell it from their own point of view. She made those witnesses her narrators. So Joshua Chamberlain’s stand on Little Round Top is told by his younger brother Thomas, who remembers the Bowdoin professor as a bookworm “so tender he wouldn’t kill a rabbit.”
Welles Crowther’s last morning in the south tower comes to readers through the eyes of the people who loved him.
It’s an approach that demands a lot of an author. She has to stay faithful to the record while imagining a voice, and she has to respect the people on the page enough to let them speak with their fears and flaws intact. For MacCallum, who has spent more than two decades in the anchor chair at Fox News, the instinct is familiar. Good interviews and good history start the same way: find the person who was in the room, and listen.
Martha Bowes MacCallum grew up in Wyckoff, New Jersey. She graduated from Ramapo High School in Franklin Lakes and earned a political science degree from St. Lawrence University in New York’s North Country.
Journalism wasn’t her first plan. She worked in theater and waited tables before entering television, where she started from the bottom.
She has been open about how hard those early years were. “I remember feeling the importance of an interview or feeling something we had to get on the air was so important that there were times you would just feel like crying,” she told Woman’s World, adding that she would tell her younger self that failure is “all part of the process of becoming wiser about what you do.”
MacCallum joined Fox News in 2004. She anchored The Live Desk, then co-anchored America’s Newsroom from 2010 to 2017, and launched The First 100 Days in January 2017, which became The Story. She is the anchor and executive editor of the program and co-anchors the network’s election coverage with Bret Baier.
The partnership with Baier has put her at the center of the country’s biggest political nights. Their August 2023 Republican primary debate in Milwaukee averaged about 13 million viewers, the highest-rated non-sports telecast of that year. George Washington University’s Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief, called the pair “the dream team.” Their town halls have included Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 2019; President Donald Trump in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 2020; and a 2022 joint forum with Ohio Senate candidates JD Vance and Tim Ryan.
Her approach to an interview is simple. Some politicians, she told Forbes this month, are skilled at going back to their talking points no matter what they’re asked. Her response is to break that routine, “politely but firmly,” by reminding them they haven’t answered the question.
That approach has made The Story a stop for Democrats who know they’ll be challenged. In October 2025, Zohran Mamdani, then running for mayor of New York, sat with her for 25 minutes. She caught him dodging a question about Hamas, pressed him on how he would pay for free buses and universal childcare, and asked him to apologize publicly to the New York City Police Department, which he did.
The other half of her career began with a family story.
When MacCallum was a teenager, her mother showed her letters written by her mother’s cousin, Harry Gray, from Marine training at Camp Lejeune and from Iwo Jima. “I was so moved by this young man’s letters, and of course I never had the opportunity to meet him,” MacCallum said. “I decided in 2018 that I would write his story.” Harry left Arlington, Massachusetts, at 18 to join the Marines. On March 13, 1945, he was killed in a mortar attack on his first march to the front lines.
The research went beyond the archives. She traveled to Iwo Jima, sat for hours interviewing Harry’s sister, her Aunt Nancy, and found his wallet and a small blood-stained prayer book. In the back of it, he had written in his own hand, “whatever is Your will is what will happen.”
She also found two men who had been with him when he died, and the result was Unknown Valor: A Story of Family, Courage, and Sacrifice from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima, co-written with Ronald J. Drez, which was published in 2020 and reached the New York Times bestseller list.
The Book of Valor is exquisitely illustrated, bringing hundreds of years of American courage to life. It belongs in every home that longs for something lasting.
The book begins with the pilgrims who stepped off the Mayflower in 1620, a century and a half before 1776, and ends in 2008. Her choices as an author set it apart from Unknown Valor.
The first is voice: she uses the witness-narrators described in her author’s note. Instead of narrating history from above, she tells it through 12 first-person voices; it is the choice of someone who once trained to play a character from the inside. The approach brings the stories and people to life vividly and creates anticipation as to what the next story will reveal.
The second is range. The book moves in order through time: the four women who survived the Mayflower, “determined to survive in the New World”; the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, in the wilds of Montana; Joshua Chamberlain at Gettysburg; Mother Cabrini, the immigrant nun who built her mission among the poor of New York City; and two “underdog” heroes of World War II.
Then comes Patrick Henry Brady in the skies of Vietnam. On Jan. 6, 1968, near Chu Lai, the young Army major flew his Huey ambulance helicopter through dense fog and used three helicopters to evacuate 51 seriously wounded men.
Welles Crowther, the “Man in the Red Bandana” of the South Tower on 9/11, was “a young man with a bright future who laid down his life to save others.” His story is told through his mother. The book ends with the Medal of Honor recipients who fought in the Battle of Shok Valley in Afghanistan.
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Five of the voices belong to Medal of Honor recipients; one chapter follows a young man who rode a segregated train to Alabama and became a “Triple Ace” fighter pilot in World War II.
The third choice, and the most revealing, is to show heroes as frightened, flawed human beings rather than statues. That humanity gives the book’s theme of fear its force and makes these stories capture your imagination and endure.