| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Bryan F. LeBeau. The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair. New York: New York University Press. 2003. Pp. ix, 387. $29.95.
When people stop believing in God, G. K. Chesterton once said, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing but rather that they will believe in anything. Madalyn Murray O'Hair would have scoffed at that remark, but Bryan F. LeBeau's serviceable biography of America's most prominent atheist arguably confirms the truth of Chesterton's assertion. Besides providing a case study in the history of American unbelief, LeBeau demonstrates—rather despite himself—that belief in one's self can be the grandest and saddest of illusions.	1
Apart from James Turner's Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (1985), historians have pretty much ignored American unbelief. Eager to provide O'Hair with a respectable pedigree, LeBeau traces that history from the "free thought" of Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine, to the classic Victorian atheism of Robert Ingersoll and Felix Adler, to the "secular humanism" of Corliss Lamont, Paul Kurtz, and the American Humanist Association.	. . .

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