Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: absolutely dire

This was an extremely poorly written, badly researched book. The writing style was insultingly simplistic, the descriptions mundane and at one point I began to wonder whether in fact I had picked up a book aimed at children. The most unanswerable question was not 'what is the meaning of life?' but how a 13th century 16 year old boy who had never left Venice managed to talk fluently with a Northern Afghan woman living in a remote village. Perhaps he'd done an Open University course before leaving the city. Or the Afghan village had an extensive Linguaphone library. And at one point he was cutting willow for charcoal into matchstick sized pieces - he would never have seen a match because they weren't around then!