Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: A valiant attempt

As soon as I started the book I thought, this reads like a National Geographic article. Sure enough, when I looked at the author notes, I saw that Valliant has written for NG. Which is precisely the problem with the book. He has used the story of the Golden Spruce like a hook to hang a number of science articles on. As for madness and mayhem, the actual culprit becomes a ghost in the book, a sketched out caricature used as an excuse to give the reader a geology lesson.Valliant loves facts, and if this was a textbook it would be above average in readability, but it purports to be something more, and in that it fails.