Tim Choy, Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Kong. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 224 pp. Tim Choy begins his ethnographic journey through Kong's conservation groups in the heart of one of the country parks, where villagers are exercising their indigenous land rights to bulldoze a six-hectare tract of land in order to build a low-density housing complex and a golf course. Would Choy, at the risk of being seen as a meddling foreigner, side with the passionate environmentalists in their efforts to spare endangered animals' habitats the putting green? Or would he side with the villagers and their quaint traditions against the imperialist environmental activists, even though these may not amount to much more than a cynical land-grab to cash in on Kong's bellicose luxury real estate market? What follows is an exquisite anthropological account of how recent environmental campaigns in Kong resonate with social and political dilemmas surrounding its return to Chinese sovereignty. At the crux of these dilemmas is a preoccupation with the of Kong in relation to China and, more abstractly, principles of universalism and particularism. Just as discussions were getting under way about the future of Kong under Chinese sovereignty, so a language of endangerment mediated by a discourse on threat and uniqueness (dahksik, in Cantonese) fashioned Kong's various environmental campaigns. We learn, for example, of how the pink dolphin, unheard of by most Kong residents prior to the 1990s, became a national mascot at gala ceremonies marking Kong's return to China, chosen as a celebrated species because it was unique to the territory. And how the Tai O fishing village, remembered by older residents as a squalid repository of squatter settlements during Kong's raggedy development, became a site of nostalgia and tourism countering attempts to reconstruct its stilted houses (built in a style similar to those found in Malaysia). Most delightfully of all, we learn that the naming of Kong's flora and fauna reflects the distinctiveness with which Kong citizens see themselves in relation to their mainland counterparts; the awkwardly named Spiranthes Hongkongitis, a flower believed to be a genetically and reproductively distinct species in its own right...similar but distinct from (60) the Spiranthes Sinesis. Even more conveniently, the latter is thought by some botanists to be biologically the mother of the former-an obvious reference to China's relationship with Kong. The conservation motif need not stop with the environment, as Choy acknowledges. Academic departments in some of Kong's Universities have sought to reclaim Hong Kong studies and made them a focus of their programs. The democractic movement is also a conservation movement of sorts; an effort to forestall Kong's economic and political absorption by China. To this I would add that there is more than a kernel of conservationism in claims made by politicians the other end of the political spectrum; that Kong's resources will be depleted by migrants flooding over the Mainland and, more recently, other southeast Asian countries since Kong's courts have recently ruled that it is unconstitutional to deny the permanent right of abode to the 350,000 or so migrant domestic helpers the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. …