A charming use of pasta creation as a learning metaphor for managers.
A seasoned administrator employs the analogy of making ravioli to convey key team concepts in this debut business book.
In his introduction, Manganiello, who currently works for a Delaware-based nonprofit and has held several other managerial positions in the public and private sectors, notes that his childhood memory of his grandparents’ homemade ravioli inspired this book. Even he had “perceived the planning, preparation and work that went into their making.” He then unspools an instructive tale featuring 10-year-old cousins Abigail and Theresa, who oversleep and miss out on the delicious ravioli whipped up by their 60-year-old grandfathers, twin brothers Alfredo and Mario. The men then tell the girls how they, too, had failed to savor some ravioli by similarly failing to get out of bed at the same age, but then learned how to make the pasta. They ultimately built a successful ravioli business by visiting various people (including relatives) to fully understand how the dish was concocted, respectfully handling their growing teams, and responding appropriately to many challenges, including saying no to an order that was too large to be handled in the time frame requested. Their tale concludes on page 96, with the text then transitioning to a flash-forward of the girls, now graduated from college, thanking their grandfathers, who are in their 80s, for their insights. The women share the themes that they’ve learned, grouped under the acronym RAVIOLI (with “V” including one-paragraph discussions of “vision,” “values,” “variety,” and “valuable”). Recipes to make ravioli dough and filling as well as accompanying meatballs and sauces complete the text. Manganiello has certainly chosen a more enjoyable, indeed mouth-watering, product for his business discussion than those classic— and boring—widgets. He sprinkles a bit too many “Ravioli Rules” callout boxes throughout this narrative, however, which serves to interrupt the flow of the grandfathers’ saga. The author also introduces an array of less-than-memorable secondary characters the two men hire or otherwise interact with. Still, the women’s acronym becomes a delightful, succinct wrap-up for this pleasingly folksy, intergenerational tale, with the included recipes an especially tasty takeaway.
A charming use of pasta creation as a learning metaphor for managers.Pub Date: July 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9887532-0-4
Page Count: 126
Publisher: TribeSound
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
