"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,........

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