A fascinating book full of interesting facts about ants. The two authors are entomologists and there is a lot about their personal experience doing field work all over the world, especially in the tropics, which livens it up. Strangely, although there are two authors, it is mostly written in the first person. That is a bit confusing, did the authors each write separate chapters?

The book explains some difficult concepts well. I had read elsewhere that sister ant are more closely related to each other than their mother, but reading this book, I understand why. Elsewhere, they probably assume too much for some readers. Not everyone will know how RNA works, and I think very few people know what the word 'inquiline' means. The authors do mention very frequently that they are scientists, which gets a little tiresome.

Nevertheless, bottom line, all sorts of interesting things about all sorts of ant species, and well explained. I didn't know that in the southern States a hundred people die because of allergic reaction to ant bites in a year, for instance.

The book has been translated into Dutch by Ans van der Graaf, and it read very naturally and easily for me. 'Rudy' Kipling should be 'Rudyard', but maybe that was an error in the original. In one place 'our country' ('ons land') is written about Germany (there are 100 ant species there), but the reader in Dutch might think that was about the Netherlands and/or Belgium.