Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: More of a survey than a critique

Between what this book could do and what it does there is a shortfall. It is a useful and indeed detailed survey of a large number of works with either homosexual texts or subtexts. What there is little of, however, is any real sense of either purpose or argument. There is a basic premise that Homosexuality has been codified since time inmemorial, but this does little to give the book any sort of through-line. Individual chapters, particularly that on the renaissance, which alone could fill a small library with books on male-male love in the period, seem to almost pass their subjects by. Either the book should have been much longer or much shorter. it falls between the stools as an over-padded short look at the subject, which is a pity.