Books: God, France & the Virgin

NOTRE-DAME OF PARIS (341 pp.) -Allan Temko -Viking ($6.75). I darted a contemptuous look on the stately monuments of superstition.

-Edward Gibbon (speaking of the Gothic cathedrals)

All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

-Henry Adams

A disciple of Adams rather than Gibbon, Medievalist Allan Temko, 31, has put his love and knowledge of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame into an astute and eloquent book that merits shelfroom with Adams' famed Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. But while Adams sought out only the major thread of medieval unity, Author Temko weaves...

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