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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Informative But Not Especially Engaging, March 3, 2003
Whether you're an ardent fan or a bitter foe of world-renowned atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, once widely known as "the most hated woman in America," you've probably read most of what Bryan Le Beau's biography has to tell you already, whether it's in O'Hair's own books, such as "All the Questions You Ever Wanted to Ask American Atheists -- With All the Answers," in her elder son William J. Murray's critical autobiography "My Life Without God," or in other third-person accounts of her life's work such as Lawrence Wright's "Saints & Sinners." I credit the author with bringing together a comprehensive compilation of facts, figures, observations, and quotations, but unfortunately not with presenting a unified portrait of a major figure of late 20th-century American free thought. Le Beau's exposé begins promisingly enough as we're treated to invaluable excerpts from O'Hair's diary entries covering the early days of her adult life, when she was still wrestling with many of the iconoclastic ideas that would later make her famous, and which are more a part of our present worldview than most people probably want to admit. She left her first husband for another man during the conformist McCarthy era, for instance, nearly twenty years before such behavior became socially acceptable, and refused to marry the father of her second son because she considered him her intellectual inferior. The book shows us the genesis of her mission against the influence of organized religion in the lives of unbelievers as well as her family's exodus from persecution and hostility. All too quickly, however, we move into the realm of religious polemics and lose sight of the colorful personality behind the Murray (and later O'Hair) family's struggle to protect what Madalyn regarded as her First Amendment right to freedom not only of but also from religion. She had only begun her fight when she won her 1963 landmark victory in the Supreme Court to have mandatory prayer and Bible reading removed from America's public schools, and wasn't about to stop there. By the book's midpoint, quotes from O'Hair's radio and television broadcasts are presented out of chronological sequence without a unifying theme that might show us more of the real motivation behind the message. In William Murray's autobiography, which for the most part depicts O'Hair as a heartless villainess, she at least emerges as a three-dimensional flesh-and-blood human being who for better or worse held sway over a coterie of non-conformists and freethinkers who, apparently like her son, began to resent and ultimately to rebel against the extent of her influence. He honestly exposes his own flaws as well, at least up to a point, explaining how he virtually abandoned his daughter to his mother's care as he struggled with drugs and alcohol. For him, religion was the cure-all. For Madalyn O'Hair, we learn, it was just another soporific intoxicant best avoided by responsible individuals. Le Beau's analysis presents Madalyn O'Hair more as the often cold, analytical brain behind the operation than its warm, pulsing heart, even though it offers us random detailed glimpses of her emotional vicissitudes -- courage, bitterness, determination, panic -- and while it is more impartial than Murray's book, it never takes us very far beneath the surface. We learn little about O'Hair's second marriage, which lasted more than a decade, or her relationship with her family after her notoriety began to wane in the 1980s, when her son William became a Christian and when she began to alienate many of her former supporters with her increasingly outrageous behavior. Even most of those who stood by her to the end are only mentioned in passing. For nearly eighty pages (and through more than the usual number of typographical errors), Le Beau's O'Hair remains only a figurehead to us, even as he discusses her mysterious disappearance in 1995 and her eventual murder, which even those who had long hated her found inexplicably brutal. Even though we may admire O'Hair as an indefatigable pioneer of secularism (or hate her as a foul-mouthed exponent of irreligion), we only occasionally feel we really know her as the driven human being she unquestionably was. While the astute reader can discover how O'Hair managed to distill the ideas of other freethinkers from Socrates to Carl Sagan into a refreshing elixir of liberating unbelief, the book remains more journalism than true biography. If you like cold facts, though, presented dispassionately, this is the book for you.
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