Even with the recent diaspora of Hong Kong film directors and stars to Western countries, especially to Hollyood (think of Chow Yun-fat co-starring with Jodie Foster in Anna and the King), Hong Kong cinema remains an iceberg to the Western audience. People often hold partial, if not biased, views of Hong Kong cinema, believing that it is no more than martial art fantasies or gangster blood-shedding. Good scholarly essays on Hong Kong cinema do exist. Enlightening us on the subject, they also generate the desire for getting a while and detailed picture of it. A 1996 Fireside book by Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins, in a catalogue format, offered useful guidance to such an overview. Titled _Sex and Zen & a Bullet in the Head, this book's discussion of Hong Kong cinema is brief and is heavily inclined to cinemagoers' search for exotic entertainment. Its authors clearly state that an inetellectual access of Hong Kong cinema will not "adequately describe its 'scalding propulsion'" (p. 11), and will only kill the fun. The book by Stokes and Hoover proves this statement wrong. The strength of this new book on Hong Kong cinema lies with a good contribution of, on the one hand, its political economy approach, insights obtained from recent cultural studies theories, knowledge of Chinese culture, and familiarity with Hong Kong cinema scholarship, and, on the other hand, a lively, informative, and entertaining discussion of the Hong Kong film industry and its culture, directors, stars, genres, and films. The authors' resourcefulness with such writers as Marx, Foucault, Benjamin, Bakhtin, and Bhabha, complements their medium- and culture-specific attention to the details of their subject in hand--the book's discussion on the whole is enlightening and fun.

The Hoover and Stokes book deals with the energy of Hong Kong cinema by carefully investigating the broad range it creates. It branches out from the better-known John Woo type of action thrillers to offer a panorama of Hong Kong cinema: Ringo Lam's cinema verite style films, Kirk Wong's dramatization of police corruption, the Bruce Lee type of martial art action, the filmic craze for legendary martial art hero Wong Fei-hung, the ghost story genre, plus swordsplays, anti-Bruce Lee and anti-heroic Jackie Chan, Ann Hui's exile dramas, Stanley Kwan's nostalgic romances, Tsui Hark's otherwordly fantasies, Yim Ho's fascination with a non-materialist rural China, Wong Kar-wai's art films, Hong Kong comedies, Lunar New Year movies, the profit-oriented Wong Jing style of recycled small-budget "quickies," the "on the fly" style of shooting films without scripts, sadism, feminism, gay and lesbian representations, and so on.

The obvious diversity of the cultural components included in this range, or this culture's hybrid nature, is explained by the authors' keen observation of the peculiar Hong Kong post-colonial condition: how "Hong Kong has experience feature of early [ruthless competition that created unstable social relations shown, for example, in a bloody battlefield as the subtext of John Woo's gangster movies] and late [globalization shown, for example, in a cinematic culture constantly reshaped by the kaleidoscope experience of living between and across various cultures, communities, and countries] capital accumulation simultaneously" (p. 11); how Hong Kong's quick cultural changes, partially shown in the constant demolition and reconstruction in its cities, keep reinventing Hong Kong identity out of disappearance (p. 142); and how Hong Kong cinema functions as a crisis cinema, obsessed with such themes as dislocation and displacement, to testify to the transient nature of this former British colony now being handed over to the new boss of a totalitarian regime of mainland China. The last point here explains the title of the book, _City on Fire_, borrowed from a Ringo Lam title-Hong Kong is shown as a place of "fervent passios and fears of the unknown" (p. 65). This last point also annotates a frame printed on the cover of the book, showing Chow Yun-fat burning a counterfeit $100 bill to light his capacity-the picture is not only about escalation in crime reflecting a looting before abandonment but also about Hong Kong itself "burning with anxiety and confusion" (p. 37).

To organize Hong Kong cinema's diversity into a smooth yet striking narrative is not an easy job. This book's 12 chapters, all having lively titles, move on smoothly with well-defined focuses. Occasionally, however, a reader may also encounter some confusion. Chapter 7 discusses new-wave filmmakers with a strong theme of cultural alienation. Some related non-new-wave titles, somehow, are also discussed here with equal emphasis. This discussion reduces the valuable, if not inadequate, narrative space for the Hong Kong cinematic new wave. In the same token, new-wave directors discussed elsewhere, such as Yim Ho in the chapter about handover anxeity (Chapter 11), are not striking enough about the director himself for a casual reader to remember. While gender issues are discussed at different places throughout the book, a chapter on this topic (Chapter 10) becomes weak and needs a better explanation of why it is discussed together with the topic of food. Definitely not only a book for general reading but a well-researched and timely contribution to the scholarship of Hong Kong cinema, the book also has a technical omission-given the different ways film titles have been translated, considering their importance for the book's discussion, and respecting scholars and readers with knowledge of Chinese, an appendix of film titles in Chinese (Romanized or in characters) should have been provided by the author.