Instruct: Classify a review into positive or negative sentiment.
Query: Straightforward and unapologetic

While some readers may be offended by the author's unromantic views of nature writing and ecocriticism alike, Dana Philips is at least honest about his pragmatic and often scathing opinions and analyses. He refuses to be swept away by the mystery of nature and believes that it is useless and counter-productive for nature writers to reflect on their own act of reflecting. I would like to have known that this was a dissection of specific authors and even specific works of those authors (Dillard, Lopez and more), before purchasing it; by the title, I was anticipating a broader philosophic or paradigmatic work. I found myself laughing aloud at a few points, when Philips' clever writing style surprised me with an unexpected turn of phrase or an unusual visual image!