LOSING SLEEP; How Your Sleeping Habits Affect Your Life <i> By Linda Dotto (William Morrow: $21.95) </i>

This could be the definitive text in an interesting hybrid of a science--which we’ll call biosociology, for want of a better name. Science writer Linda Dotto examines all aspects of sleep--various kinds, too much, too little, interrupted sleep and active sleep, baby sleep and elderly sleep. Then she takes a look at how contemporary society encourages the development of sleep disorders and punishes the people who suffer from them.

Sleep, she posits, is the Rodney Dangerfield of our physiological existence. We don’t give it any respect; we think we can get along on too little, or ignore the signs that we’re not getting high-quality sleep. We blame ourselves for circadian rhythms that are at odds with our jobs or life styles, not recognizing that the body’s clock is quite an insistent little machine. If you’re a lark--the kind of person who’s alert at 6 a.m. and flat by noon--you’re going to have trouble with the night shift. If you’re an owl, slogging out of bed at 10 but raring to go at midnight, you might consider that job on the Pacific Stock Exchange.

Dotto’s book is a rich mine of fascinating detail, some of it frightening (young man drives 14 miles, murders his mother-in-law, and is acquitted because he was asleep at the time), some of it reassuring (even a 10-minute nap helps). She is a participant-writer who opens her tale with the surreal narration of her own experiment in closely monitored sleep deprivation. And she is, blessedly, possessed of a writing style that manages to make even the scientific data come alive.

She understands the value of the pithy anecdote, and has managed to find a selection of interview subjects--like a marathon swimmer who once was pulled from a pool, dead asleep, after 5 1/2 days of swimming--to enliven the book.

It’s enough to keep you up nights.