Preview: Princeton University Press, Princeton, Nj, 167 pp; Paperback, ISBN13: 978-0-691-13879-4, Price: Usd 19.95, £ 13.95 Prof. Dr. James F.A. Traniello, Department of Biology, Boston University, 5 Cummington Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA. E-mail: jft@bu.edu Myrmecol. News 14: 36 (online 24 June 2010) Issn 1994-4136 (print), Issn 1997-3500 (online) Received 17 May 2010; accepted 18 May 2010 In its title, Ant encounters reflects both the first-person account and focus of Deborah GORDON's keen observations, models and experiments on the social dynamics of colonies of the ant Pogonomyrmex barbatus. She has written the book for a broad audience, explaining many basic concepts necessary to understand how an ant colony operates while accentuating the contributions of her unique research to the study of P. barbatus colony organization, and more generally, biological complexity. It is in a sense a continuation of her book Ants at work: How an insect society is organized, informed…