Peter Macinnis





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Peter Macinnis

Goodreads author profile


born
April 25, 1944 in Australia

gender
male

website

twitter username

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influences
Peter Mason, Henry Lawson, Peter Medawar, J B S Haldane, Rudyard Kipli...more

member since
March 2008


About this author

A happy grandfather who travels a lot in the name of research. He writes for adults and younger readers, mainly about history or science, but likes variety. He is published by the National Library of Australia (Australian Backyard Naturalist came out on May 1, another book out in October). He talks on ABC Radio National and has been translated into seven other languages.

His writing blog is Old Writer on the Block. Google it and say g'day!

He's McManly on most social media. His Kokoda Track: 101 Days was a 2008 Eve Pownall Honour Book in the Children's Book Council of Australia 'Book of the Year' awards. His Australian Backyard Explorer was the 2010 Eve Pownall Book of the Year.


Yesterday, I spent an exhilarating morning at the local Catholic primary school, talking to and then working with a select bunch of talented young writers (ages 11-12), drawn from Sydney'e northern beaches area.

Old fogeys who mumble about falling standards and the younger generation have their heads up their whatnots. I met and read the work of one youngster who will be winning major prizes in... read more »
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Published on September 02, 2011 16:08 • 60 views
Average rating: 3.50 · 139 ratings · 42 reviews · 34 distinct works
Poisons: From Hemlock to Bo...
3.4 of 5 stars 3.40 avg rating — 77 ratings — published 2004 — 5 editions
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Bittersweet: The Story of S...
3.47 of 5 stars 3.47 avg rating — 30 ratings — published 2003 — 2 editions
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Mr Darwin's Incredible Shri...
3.56 of 5 stars 3.56 avg rating — 9 ratings — published 2008 — 2 editions
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The Killer Bean Of Calabar ...
4.6 of 5 stars 4.60 avg rating — 5 ratings2 editions
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Kokoda Track: 101 Days
4.0 of 5 stars 4.00 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 2007 — 2 editions
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Australian Backyard Explorer
4.67 of 5 stars 4.67 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 2009
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Rockets: Sulfur, Sputnik an...
3.67 of 5 stars 3.67 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 2004
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100 Discoveries: The Greate...
3.0 of 5 stars 3.00 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 2008 — 3 editions
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The Speed of Nearly Everyth...
3.0 of 5 stars 3.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 2008
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Australia's Pioneers, Heroe...
4.0 of 5 stars 4.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2007
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More books by Peter Macinnis…

Upcoming Events

Australian Schoolyard Naturalist
Author appearance, August 23, 2012 04:14PM
National Library of Australia, Conference Room, Level 4, Parkes Place, Canberra, AU

http://www.nla.gov.au/education/for-teachers-and-students
Author and educator Peter Macinnis will present practical projects related to bi...more


Descants (Nonfiction)
1 chapters   —   updated Mar 29, 2010 04:33pm
Description: Short pieces (I aim at about 700 words a time) on the origins and mutated meanings of certain interesting words. I have about half a book, and I return to fossick around the outlines every now and then.

Peter's Recent Updates

Peter Macinnis gave 5 of 5 stars false to:
Life by Mal Peet
Life: An Exploded Diagram
by Mal Peet
read in May, 2012
My rating:
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I read this at the suggestion of the author, in order to give we workshop participants at a Sydney Writers' Festival one piece of common ground. I liked the book so much that I went out and got 'Tamar' as well. Love in the time of Cuban missile crise...more
Peter Macinnis made a comment on the video: How to make a pooter
How to make a pooter
"The pooter is a really neat devices. The design I show here is simple, easy to make, and completely safe. "
Peter Macinnis gave 5 of 5 stars false to:
Tamar by Mal Peet
My rating:
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I had the pleasure of meeting the author a a Sydney Writers' Festival workshop. He had suggested that we read his latest, 'Life, an Exploded Diagram', and I liked that so much that I read this as well. The setting switches between Britain around 1995...more
Peter Macinnis gave 4 of 5 stars false to:
Six months in the new gold-diggings by J. L. Campbell
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Peter Macinnis gave 3 of 5 stars false to:
Welcome, Stranger by Denise Deason
Welcome, Stranger
by Denise Deason
read in May, 2012
My rating:
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Peter Macinnis gave 5 of 5 stars false to:
The Constitution of the United States of America by James Madison
My rating:
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It might seem odd that an Australian would list this—and if you look at the shelves, Americans will find one apparent inconsistency. Folks, if you see 'odd' or 'inconsistent', you don't know the full story. Because Britain has and had no written cons...more
More of Peter's books…
Jacques Loeb
“The writer found that certain freshwater crustaceans, namely Californian species of Daphnia, copepods, and Gammarus when indifferent to light can be made intensely positively heliotropic by adding some acid to the fresh water, especially the weak acid CO2. When carbonated water (or beer) to the extent of about 5 c.c. or 10 c.c. is slowly and carefully added to 50 c.c. of fresh water containing these Daphnia, the animals will become intensely positive and will collect in a dense cluster on the window side of the dish. Stronger acids act in the same way but the animals are likely to die quickly. . . Alcohols act in the same way. In the case of Gammarus the positive heliotropism lasts only a few seconds, while in Daphnia it lasts from 10 to 50 minutes and can be renewed by the further careful addition of some CO2.”
Jacques Loeb

Shirley Hazzard
“In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.”
Shirley Hazzard

“Science is part of culture. Culture isn't only art and music and literature, it's also understanding what the world is made of and how it functions. People should know something about stars, matter and chemistry. People often say that they don't like chemistry but we deal with chemistry all the time. People don't know what heat is, they hardly know what water is. I'm always surprised how little people know about anything. I'm puzzled by it.”
Max Perutz

“The division of our culture is making us more obtuse than we need be: we can repair communications to some extent: but, as I have said before, we are not going to turn out men and women who understand as much of their world as Piero della Francesca did of his, or Pascal, or Goethe. With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of the imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant either of the endowments of applied science, of the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once seen, cannot be denied.”
C.P. Snow

Václav Havel
“At one time, the state of culture in Czechoslovakia was described, rather poignantly, as a 'Biafra of the spirit'. . . I simply do not believe that we have all lain down and died. I see far more than graves and tombstones around me. I see evidence of this in . . . expensive books on astronomy printed in a hundred thousand copies (they would hardly find that many readers in the USA) . . .”
Václav Havel

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This Group expolores scientific topics. We have an active monthly book club, as well as discussions on a variety of topics including Science in the Ne...more
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