BOOK REVIEW : A Current Snapshot of Science, Technology : THE ALMANAC OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY <i> Edited by Richard Golob, Eric Brus</i> Harcourt Brace Jovanovich $59.95 cloth, $29.95 paper, 530 pages

Being a book person, I enjoy browsing in bookstores, particularly used bookstores. You never know what you might stumble across at Dutton’s in North Hollywood or Acres of Books in Long Beach or Powell’s in Portland. These are wonderful places to while away an hour or on an afternoon.

But the science department of such establishments is usually disappointing. Very few nuggets turn up in these sections, which typically contain a few dusty books of mathematical tables, bestsellers of seasons past and a healthy number of volumes with titles like “The Almanac of Science and Technology: What’s New and What’s Known,” published in, say, 1952 or 1963. They always feel so dated.

In coming years those shelves will contain “The Almanac of Science and Technology” published in 1990, the book we consider today.

For openers, it’s a very good book. The editors, Richard Golob and Eric Brus, have done a remarkable job of gathering first-rate essays on the current state of affairs in a zillion different subjects. You want to know about the grand unified theory in physics? Monoclonal antibodies in biotechnology? Penrose tiling in topology? AIDS research? The Soviet spaceplane? Magnetic bubble memories for computers? The Greenhouse Effect? I could keep going for several paragraphs and still not begin to scratch the surface of what’s included. You get the idea.

The almanac is the place to look for a concise, comprehensive, intelligible statement of where things stand and how they got there. Each article typically explains important research and the theories that underlie it. As a result, the book is a very impressive, reliable cornucopia of information, likely to be a useful reference resource--perhaps as useful as my long run of “Science News” magazines.

The individual articles--none more than a few pages long--were written by science writers and speak in the clear, neutral tone of the observer. It is solid, serviceable prose, and the articles accomplish what Golob and Brus (consultant and science writer respectively) set out to do.

But it’s not clear to me who would actually sit down and read such a volume, from Page 1 (“Solar System Update--The Sun”) straight through to Page 487 (“Room-Temperature Fusion”). I used to have an aunt, God rest her soul, who said she read the dictionary as a way of improving her vocabulary. Not to speak ill of the dead, but I was always suspicious of that claim. The almanac suffers from what I am told is called “the librarian’s problem”--how to store information so it can be found. The book contains an index, which may or may not prove useful on the day I’m looking something up. It’s impossible for indexers to anticipate all of the ways people might look for things. Nor am I certain that if I wanted to know about Parkinson’s disease and brain grafting I would think to look in the almanac, which has an article on the subject.

Oddly, there are no bibliographies or “suggested reading” lists at the end of the articles, which you’d expect in an undertaking of this kind. Nor has the almanac solved a perennial problem in many spheres of life: If you’re up to the minute, you’ll be out of date the next minute. The almanac is a snapshot of science today. But the future is unknowable. (You heard it here first.)

In some areas, today’s theories will be overtaken by tomorrow’s research. The development of the science will take a different turn. In other areas, hot topics may disappear altogether. Sometime in the future, perhaps El Nino will be found to be a statistical anomaly or a mistake in meteorological data. Or perhaps medical researchers will discover that there is no relationship between personality type and heart disease.

Something like that is bound to happen, and when it does, the almanac will feel very out of date. Even before then, it will turn up on the shelves of used bookstores.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews James N. Gregory’s “American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California.”