<p>This research adopted a corpus-based approach in order to examine the pragmatic performance of native and Malaysian reviewers in terms of employing hedging devices to attenuate criticisms in academic book reviews. To this end, a corpus of 240 book reviews reviewed by two groups (120 natives and 120 non-natives) was analyzed. The analysis was performed based on the taxonomy of hedging devices proposed by Hyland (1998c). The results illustrated that generally natives utilized more hedges compared to non-natives and there is a statistically significant difference between them. In addition, native reviewers employed different kinds of hedging words more frequently than non-native reviewers. The most frequent employed hedging category was modals and the least used one was adverbial hedges by both groups and there was a statistically significant difference between native and non-native reviewers in terms of all categories of hedges, except the noun. Finally, it was observed that native reviewers produced more and different lexical hedges compared to non-native reviewers. The findings can have implications for teachers, language learners, material designers, and developers, especially in second language contexts.</p>