Reviewed by: Pura Vida: Beginning Spanish by Norma López-Burton and Laura Marqués Pascual Carol Wallace López-Burton, Norma, Laura Marqués Pascual, and Cristina Pardo Ballester. Pura Vida: Beginning Spanish. Hoboken: Wiley, 2014. Pp. 490. ISBN 978-1-118-08710-7 [paperback] / ISBN 978-1-118-51476-4 [looseleaf] / ISBN 978-1-118-51474-0 [activities manual] / ISBN 978-1-118-38170-0 [instructor’s edition]. In her author statement for the Pura Vida: Beginng Spanish textbook, Norma López Burton says that her goal has been to build “a curriculum in which all activities would be truly communicative, and all instructors would present culture in a sensitive and consistent manner” (vii). Her stated desire to break down cultural stereotypes that lump all “Hispanics” into a single group is evident in the structuring of the textbook around individual countries and regions, including the seldom mentioned Equatorial Guinea. Short readings explain cultural practices within those specific countries and the cultural context is often integrated into vocabulary and grammar activities. This emphasis on culture is one of the strengths of the book, but also proves to be one of its weaknesses. According to ACTFL’s proficiency guidelines, students at the novice and intermediate levels communicate primarily on familiar personal topics, but this understanding is often compromised in the interests of presenting culturally relevant material. For example, the vocabulary list for the clothing chapter includes items in a Guatemalan market, but fails to include many of the things actually worn by students. In chapter 6, the preterit forms of all verbs, regular, stem-changing and irregular, are presented in the context of Spanish history and art. New verbs include atacar, conquistar, derrotar, invadir, gobernar, and so on—few of which are useful to students in their daily lives—and the ordinal numbers are presented by using the series of kings named Alfonso in Spanish history. Activities that require students to identify historical people or place historical events in order do not spark the interest of the majority of students and are not highly useful for novice level communication tasks. The book contains a preliminary chapter and 12 complete chapters, each of which is really two chapters with separate vocabulary lists and grammar sections. The chapters are well laid out with a list of learning objectives at the beginning of each section and a checklist for students [End Page 697] at the end of each section. Pura vida contains a comprehensive array of traditional grammar topics, up to and including the past subjunctive and hypothetical situations in the last chapter. The last two chapters of the text may be eliminated to better fit a two-semester sequence, but this leaves out some important topics such as the present perfect, which could logically be presented much earlier. The graphics in the book are generally attractive, although some of the pictures used to present vocabulary can be difficult to identify and the authors’ decision to place cognates in a separate list at the bottom without using them in the graphics may lead students to ignore these important words. There are some errors, such as a picture in the chapter on professions that is labeled a dentist but actually shows an eye doctor, which will presumably be corrected in future editions. Each section has two illustrated narrative sequences called “La pura verdad,” which can be presented with audio via the multimedia Power Point presentations supplied on the website. These sequences often have a humorous element, which sometimes works and sometimes falls flat. Each chapter also provides a video involving a conversation between a native speaker and a non-native speaker. The purpose seems to be to encourage students to see that their Spanish doesn’t need to be perfect in order to communicate, but in at least one case the non-native speaker’s accent is so poor that it consistently elicits laughter from students who have been studying the language for only a few weeks. This same chapter 3 video also contains a scene where the female student, who is being given a tour of a home by a male friend, flops down on the bed and comments on how comfortable it...