In this task, you are given books product reviews in English language. The goal is to classify the review as "POS" if the overall sentiment of the review is positive or as "NEG" if the overall sentiment of the review is negative.
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Question: Another adult hooked on this supposed kids' series . For the Terry Pratchett fans out there, nothing more need be said. It's Pratchett, you want to read it, the only reason you've been hesitating is because it's marked as a kids book (juvenile, young adult...) But this one isn't just for kids. As with any Pratchett book, there are layers and layers, and some of them wouldn't be obvious to kids at all.    For example, kids who have only seen the Batman movies, and not the original TV show, will miss it entirely when Mrs. Tachyon is saying "dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner..." and continues a few more times between interruptions, finally ending with "dinner, dinner, Batman!" which is where adults (at least my generation) will realize she's not saying dinner, she's humming the theme song. Also, kids the age of our protagonists, 13 or so, may not recognize the "red shift" when they get to it; that's usually covered a bit later in the science curriculum, such as college physics.    The protagonists are Johnny, and his friends Wobbler (who wobbles), Bigmac (who is large), and Yo-less, who is apparently the only black in Blackbury who doesn't say yo. They are joined in this book by Kirsty/Kasandra (she changes her name each week), who is hyper-intelligent and socially even more inept than the others. Each of this team has his own strange store of skills or knowledge. These talents turn out to have entirely different implications when travelling in time than they do in their own time. Bigmac's car-stealing abilities (which some parents may object to in a kids' book) turn out to be impaired when trying to steal a car that doesn't have power steering and power brakes. On the other hand, Yo-less's lack of cool is suddenly changed when he puts on period clothing and suddenly looks, as Johnny says, as though he plays the saxophone in a band. Yo-less does, though get exposed to the more primitive social prejudices of 1941, as does Kasandra. And Bigmac finds out that the skinhead symbols and attitudes that he wears only as a social item suddenly have real meaning, and it's not pleasant. OK, there's a bit of a moral or two snuck in here, about thinking about what things mean. There is also at least one moral that readers one and all will ignore, just as the characters do, about following advice (and about giving it).     Johnny has been working on his World War II project for school since the previous book, "Johnny and the Dead." One of the funny bits in the book is how, whenever a kid claims he's doing "a project," he winds up with all sorts of information that is unsuitable for kids, and/or hitherto classified or secret; the remembered horror of school projects makes all the adults give in so that they don't have to think about it any more!    Other reviewers have described much of the plot, so I won't repeat it here. One thing that some readers may wish to note about this plot is that it isn't just time travel, it's alternate history as well, and for kids this may serve as an introduction to the whole sub-genre of alternate history. Meanwhile, some of the high points:  * Mrs. Tachyon's cat, Guilty - and his tastes in food.  * The ice that forms on the characters during their last-minute rush for the air-raid siren.  * The importance of pickles.    The series has no noticeable sexual content, and no real bad language; the most dangerous things in it for young readers are the ideas, which may make them *gasp* think! It may also make them lifelong Pratchett addicts. In the opinion of an existing Pratchett addict, there's nothing at all wrong with that

Answer: POS


Question: Informative but poorly organized and biased . Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples is a widely regarded general history of the Arab world. This is too bad, since as history the book is of low quality, with significant problems of organization and, where relevant to Hourani's apparent biases, factual accuracy. It does have its redeeming elements, but on the whole is for a variety of reasons not a reliable source as a general history of the Arab world, especially for the beginner.    Being the author of a general history of the Arab world myself, before I explain why I evaluate the book negatively I would like to suggest some alternatives, lest I be accused of attacking a rival publication out of self-interest. Philip K. Hitti's The History of the Arabs is a very detailed history which runs from pre-Islamic times to the 19th century. Arthur Goldschmidt's Concise History of the Middle East covers Turkey, Iran and Israel as well as the Arab world and is well-organized for beginners. It was the first general history of the Middle East I read as an undergraduate. Bernard Lewis' The Middle East focuses more on concepts and the flow of history but is also appropriate for those without a strong background in the region.    This book was first published in 1991. This review is based on the 1992 paperback version by Warner Books.    The initial weakness of this book begins with the very first chapter; although containing 458 pages of main text, Hourani's history devotes a mere seven pages to the pre-Islamic period. This is pretty amazing, for anyone familiar with that period, since Arab history prior to Islam is roughly as long as Arab history after it. Exactly how far back Arab peoples go in history is a matter of dispute, but certainly there were people one could call "Arabians" as far back as the beginning of the first mellinnium BC, or 1,600 years prior to Muhammad. The evidence is sporadic for sure, and no writer would give it equal prominence with later times, but seven pages is pretty paltry.    One might suspect an Islamic bias here, but the problem continues in the key early periods of Islam. The life of Muhammad and his immediate successors who established the basis for the Muslim world, spanning about a half century from Muhammad's first vision to the death of his son-in-law and successor Ali, get only 11 pages. The first Arab empire, the Umayyads (661-950), gets seven pages, and the Abbasid Empire (750-circa. 945), which is usually thought of as the "Golden Age of Islam," gets only six. This means 37 pages for the first 2,000 years of Arab history, including its framing epoch, and over 400 pages for the next 1,000. This would leave the uninitiated reader entirely without much sense of proportion.    What makes this book highly unrecommended for the beginner is its weak sense of organization. The middle time period between the collapse of Abbasid authority - roughly AD 950 - and the ascendance of the Ottoman Empire over the Arab world in 1517 is intrinsically a difficult time period to understand and a more difficult one on which to write a history. This is due to the fact that rather than there being one dominant power or a few powerful states, there is instead a multiplicity of dynasties with genuine authority in some areas not extending beyond the town level with a multifarious mixture of Sunni and Shia, Arab, Persian and Turkic ruling groups, not to mention the Latin states. Hourani makes no serious attempt to help the reader keep all of it straight by moving from a chronological approach prior to 950 to a topical one. There are ten chapters covering this time period and the social history of part of the previous two periods (the Umayyads and the Abbasids). There is one chapter which discusses the major power struggles of the time. If you want to understand the relative historical roles of the Buyids, the Fatimids, the Zengids, the Ayyubids, the Mamluks and their contemporaries, read something else.    It is within these ten chapters that this book contains its major strength - its "social history," or its description of the development of the Arab world. In fact I cited Hourani on the social history sections of my own book. In this regard, Hourani really is better than the alternatives. Over 200 pages of the book is devoted to detailing various aspects of how the Arab world came to be prior to the Ottomans. So for those who have already read a general history of the Middle East or the Arab world and want a more specialized knowledge, these chapters are quite useful.    I have several objections to how this book handles a variety of issues of current interest. This book was written during a time period when there was a great emphasis on negating certain negative images of Arabs and Muslims, to the point of deemphasizing any aspect of the Arab world which might be interpreted negatively. The word "jihad" doesn't even have an entry in the index, although it is used, or perhaps, misused. On page 247, Hourani describes a traditional view stipulating that the ruler has an obligation "to pursue jihad by maintaining the strength of the kingdom's defense..." This gives a misimpression, because legally jihad has two military meanings - the defense of Muslim lands and the Muslim community's collective obligation to spread Islam through conquest. Although jihad has a spiritual as well as martial application, its use is overwhelmingly in the military context, and while Muhammad's battles probably could be described as defensive, the vast majority of military actions between that time and the 19th century involved offensive operations (the Christian counter-offensives known as the Crusades being a major exception).    More broadly, the single most influential Islamist movement of the modern age, the Wahhabis, get only a few scattered mentions, and there is no real indication of the wave of extremism which by 1991 had been felt for some time. The primary non-Islamist ideological influence, Marxism, is discussed of course, but the influence of Nazism during the 1930s and 1940s is left out. Nazi Germany is mentioned once in passing, and in the same paragraph on page 331 Palestinian leader Amin Husseini is mentioned, but it isn't mentioned that he was a strong supporter of Nazis, that he moved to Germany during the Second World War and played an active role in the Holocaust, or that despite this he was made leader of the Palestinian cause by the nascent Arab League after the war.    Hourani's account of the 1967 is incredibly inaccurate, giving the impression that Egypt engaged in some bluster and then Israel started the war. He mentions Nasser's demand that the UN clear out of the Suez Canal zone, and includes the defense pact with Jordan, but omits a key fact - the mobilization of Egyptian forces in the Sinai. Once Egypt did this, Israel had no choice but to attack, because of its small population its economy could not handle an extended mobilization, while Egypt could. Hourani also doesn't mention the statements by Arab leaders to the effect that all Jews would be wiped out in the coming war.    On the whole, this is a useful book if one already has a framework understanding of Arab history and if one understands the slant that is being presented on issues of contemporary concern. Otherwise, I do not recommend buying it

Answer: NEG


Question: Should be in the fiction-horror section . Well, I am not financed by any right wing think tank (but if there's a think tank out there that wants to finance me--right or left--, give me a call!), but forty years ago Ehrlich was predicting massive global starvation in the 1990's.  Well, I went throught the 90's and I don't really recall that.  If you're looking for a scary but fictional story, read Steven King...or Paul Ehrlich I guess.  But let's not pretend that this has anything to do with reality.

Answer:
NEG