Initiated by Kaplan(1966), contrastive rhetoric (CR) have developed quickly from its early start as linguistic text analysis to more recent research on the social contexts of discourse and the sophisticated analyses of texts written for a variety of purposes (Connor, 2004). It is advocated that not only the national culture but also small contextual factors such as discipline should be taken into consideration in contrastive studies. Genre analysis provides a mechanism for explanation of the rationale of a certain textual features underlying in a specific genre, relating the language use to the context. Its great pedagogical value has contributed greatly to the development of English for academic and specific purpose. The present research carries out a Chinese-English contrastive study on the relatively-neglected academic discourse book reviews in applied linguistics (with 16 in English and 16 in Chinese respectively). All the book reviews are first applied Motta-Roth(1995)’s model of move analysis, then the use of evaluation categories(Hyland, 2001) in terms of the praise and criticism are investigated. The result finds that not only were Motta’Roth’s four moves identified but new unconventional steps were both found in these two languages. The Chi-square analyses suggest that there exist significant differences on the move patterns and steps, the evaluation focus, and the degree of criticalness preferred in these two languages. These results testify the idea that national culture is not the only factors contributing such difference, disciplines’ norm, value and ideology and other factors should also be considered. Such assumptions are further confirmed by the questionnaires conducted with the reviewers and review editors included in these corpora.