Mary Losure is an author of narrative nonfiction and former environmental reporter whose books explore unusual episodes from history, science, and culture.
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A famous photographic hoax illustrates how confirmation bias and flawed investigation can lead people to misinterpret evidence and accept extraordinary claims.
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Mary Losure is an author of narrative nonfiction whose books explore unusual episodes from history, science, and culture. She is the author of The Fairy Ring: Or Elsie and Frances Fool the World, Wild Boy: The Real Life of the Savage of Aveyron, and Isaac the Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal’d. Before turning to book writing, she was an award-winning environmental reporter for Minnesota Public Radio and a contributor to National Public Radio. Her work has been recognized by Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, School Library Journal, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Find her online at www.marylosure.com.
Publications by this author
Candlewick | March | 2013
What happens when society finds a wild boy alone in the woods and tries to civilize him? A true story from the author of The Fairy Ring.
One day in 1798, woodsmen in southern France returned from the forest having captured a naked boy. He had been running wild, digging for food, and was covered with scars. In the village square, people gathered around, gaping and jabbering in words the boy didn’t understand. And so began the curious public life of the boy known as the Savage of Aveyron, whose journey took him all the way to Paris. Though the wild boy’s world was forever changed, some things stayed the same: sometimes, when the mountain winds blew, “he looked up at the sky, made sounds deep in his throat, and gave great bursts of laughter.” In a moving work of narrative nonfiction that reads like a novel, Mary Losure invests another compelling story from history with vivid and arresting new life.
Back matter includes an author’s note, source notes, and a bibliography.Candlewick | March | 2012
The enchanting true story of a girl who saw fairies, and another with a gift for art, who concocted a story to stay out of trouble and ended up fooling the world.
Frances was nine when she first saw the fairies. They were tiny men, dressed all in green. Nobody but Frances saw them, so her cousin Elsie painted paper fairies and took photographs of them “dancing” around Frances to make the grown-ups stop teasing. The girls promised each other they would never, ever tell that the photos weren’t real. But how were Frances and Elsie supposed to know that their photographs would fall into the hands of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? And who would have dreamed that the man who created the famous detective Sherlock Holmes believed ardently in fairies—and wanted very much to see one? Mary Losure presents this enthralling true story as a fanciful narrative featuring the original Cottingley fairy photos and previously unpublished drawings and images from the family’s archives. A delight for everyone with a fondness for fairies, and for anyone who has ever started something that spun out of control.
Back matter includes source notes, a bibliography, and an index.
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A surprising true story of Isaac Newton’s boyhood suggests an intellectual development owing as much to magic as science.
Before Isaac Newton became the father of physics, an accomplished mathematician, or a leader of the scientific revolution, he was a boy living in an apothecary’s house, observing and experimenting, recording his observations of the world in a tiny notebook. As a young genius living in a time before science as we know it existed, Isaac studied the few books he could get his hands on, built handmade machines, and experimented with alchemy—a process of chemical reactions that seemed, at the time, to be magical. Mary Losure’s riveting narrative nonfiction account of Isaac’s early life traces his development as a thinker from his childhood, in friendly prose that will capture the attention of today’s budding scientists—as if by magic. Back matter includes an afterword, an author’s note, source notes, a bibliography, and an index.