The July 4th issue of The American Conservative has a good review by Marian Kester Coombs of America's Most Hated Woman: The Life and Gruesome Death of Madalyn Murray O'Hair. A few excerpts (no link available):
Despite (or perhaps because of) an IQ of 150, staggering levels of testosterone seemed to rule Madalyn's relentlessly foul mouth, sexual fixations, masculine brand of alcoholism, and rage at "runaway men." The anger lever was permanently pressed down in her brain, rendering her both rabid and pitiable. A "wounded outcast" never at home in her own skin, sex, class, or nation, she spent decades scraping together a home of sorts on the ragged fringes of American society. . .
Madalyn was such damaged goods that at age 35 she declared herself living "by raw rules that disgust, revolt and injure . . . I will be ostracized, by my own volition, from society henceforth." The title "America's most hated woman," conferred on her by Time magazine after her victory over school prayer in June 1963, was "a sobriquet she relished." Like most atheists, she did not so much disbelieve in God as passionately hate Him, along with his noblest creation, man. . .
Like Lee Harvey Oswald, Madalyn tried to defect to the Soviet Union in 1960 but was rejected as undesirable. Although she never formally joined the Communist Party USA (the Commies didn't want her as a member, either, fearing she'd come right out and blithely announce their real agenda), she was a Com Symp in every sense of the term, "aglow with joy" at the launch of Sputnik and talking up the wonders of Stalinist Russia at precisely the time when most thoughtful leftists were breaking with the Party. Even the ACLU eventually found itself unable to stomach her. . .
