I Was An Atheist for the FBI

Was Madalyn Murray O'Hair's husband a domestic spook sent by the FBI to spy on the American Atheist? That's roughly the claim made by Ted Dracos in UnGodly: The Passions, Torments, and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair. In Slate, Stephen Bates pretty persuasively argues that that claim is bogus. Whatever the flaws of the Dracos book, it sounds a lot juicier than Bryan F. Le Beau's The Atheist, a solid but sober intellectual biography of O'Hair, which is the subject of a scintillating writeup by the original Tim Cavanaugh in the December issue of Reason.