Browsing in a bookstore, what is the chance that anyone but an anthropologist or a natural scientist would pick up a book on lemurs in Madagascar?  And yet, if they did, and the book turned out to be Alison Jolly’s Lords and Lemurs: Mad Scientists, Kings with Spears and the Survival of Diversity in Madagascar, they would be in for a surprise.

As Jolly writes, “To most Americans, Madagascar seems farther away than the bar in Star Wars.  Actually, it is just as peculiar –and it’s real.”

Far from being an outlandish essay written by a wide-eyed foreigner, the book is a penetrating and exciting journey into the history, sociology and biodiversity of Berenty, a reserve in the extreme south of Madagascar.

Jolly says the book, due out in April, is for people who like a good story.  “I really set out to tell a tale about a place that is fascinating, and that reflects the whole world, and doesn’t seem to ‘matter’ except that it has a great story.”

That story includes Tandroy tribesmen, slavery, socialism, neo-colonialism, French lords, and exotic funeral practices with gunfire, dancing, sex, and sacrifices to the Ancestor.

For 40 years, Jolly, 67, a Rivercross resident, has studied the behavior of ring-tailed and white sifaka lemurs in Africa.  Her research at Berenty has been interspersed with teaching and research stints at the University of Zambia, Cambridge and Sussex Universities in England, and Cornell, Yale, and Princeton in the United States.  She has been the president of the International Primatological Society and is an Officer of the National Order of Madagascar.

Her love of animals, she says, began with a “series of cats” while she was growing up in Ithaca, New York, as an only child of a Cornell professor.  And if she hadn’t begun studying lemurs, she might have studied gorillas, she says, “because their calm intelligence makes them very therapeutic companions.”

Not that lemurs were her first choice – she was studying sponges at the graduate school level at Yale when boredom struck and she wanted to study something far different – and far away from Connecticut.  Madagascar was about as far away as she could get, so she went.

The results of her research have been published in books she has written or edited: Lemur Behavior (1966), The Evolution of Primate Behavior (1972, 1985), Play (1976), A World Like Our Own (1980), and Madagascar, a World out of Time (1993), among others.

Jolly, married to Sir Richard Jolly, a former UN executive, moved to Roosevelt Island in 1982, when her husband became Deputy Director of UNICEF.  “There was never any question of living elsewhere on Manhattan,” she wrote in an e-mail.  “We had four children at home at the time, and one look at the green spaces, playgrounds, and immediate sense of community on Roosevelt Island convinced us that if we could find an apartment here, we would move in.  We originally planned to come for two years, but stayed for twenty.”

The couple moved to England when Richard retired, and Alison continued her research at Sussex University.

She says there is “not much similarity between Roosevelt Island and Madagascar.  Madagascar has rainforest and baobab forest and spiny desert, and a capital city of a couple of million people that looks like a rosy-red-brick Italian hill town.  And almost 90 percent of its wild species are endemic to Madagascar.”

Economically it is one of the world’s poorest countries, “while New York is probably the richest city in the world.”

“As islands go,” Alison wrote, “maybe you could say Roosevelt Island and Madagascar are opposites.”