This text combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. The authors interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects' evolutionary achievement. Accompanying Hoelldobler and Wilson, we peer into the colony to see how ants co-operate and make war, how they reproduce and bury their dead, how they employ propaganda and surveillance and exhibit a startlingly familiar ambivalance between allegiance and self-aggrandizement. This tour of the entire range of formicid biodiversity - from social parasites to army ants, nomadic hunters, camouflaged huntresses, and builders of temperature-controlled skyscrapers - opens out increasingly into natural history, intimating the relevance of ant life to human existence. A window in the world of ants as well as those who study them, this book should be a source of knowledge and pleasure for anyone who has ever stopped to wonder about the miniature yet immense civilization at our feet.