Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: This book was horrible

I read the stock reviews and then the readers' reviews and could not agree more with Mr. Hauer's reaction. I cannot understand how anyone who reads very much could tolerate this poorly written book. Undoubtedly, Mr. Thomson is a font of knowledge on film history, but he needs a writing class badly. I threw the book down at p. 181. Try this on for size: "No doubt, esteemed Renaissance painters and eighteenth century composers were able to carry on their work without distraction. (All they had to worry about was Inquisition, plague, or sheer loss of favor.)" The book is full of bizarre, inaccurate rumblings like this - - and that's before you figure out what in the world this weird aside has to do with the history of American film. A good editor would have advised the author to reduce his dependence on convoluted sentence structure, entertain simple declarative sentences and reduce this mess to a meaty magazine article at best.