BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Life Without Uncertainty Would Certainly Be Life That’s Boring : LUCK: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life <i> by Nicholas Rescher</i> ; Farrar Straus and Giroux $19, 237 pages

Successful people almost always consider themselves deserving. They believe the world is a meritocracy, and their success proves it. They rarely think they have just been lucky.

Yet all of us know, from our own experience and from observing others, that nothing can be perfectly planned and that as often as not, events beyond our control have more to do with the outcome of things than all the planning in the world.

This observation is the central thesis of “Luck,” by Nicholas Rescher, a philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh, who writes: “The role of chance in human affairs is such that no matter which of the world’s apparent goods we yearn for--be it money, power, prestige, or whatever--we will be at the mercy of luck.”

The day I read that sentence, its undeniable truth was brought home to me yet again. I learned that an acquaintance of mine for more than 20 years, a very cautious, very sober man in his early 50s, very careful with money, who never made a decision without painstakingly considering everything about it, who invested wisely for the present and thought often about the future, had been found to have terminal cancer.

He didn’t plan on that.

In the 14th Century, the black plague is estimated to have killed as much as three-fourths of the population of Europe and Asia. Which means that one-fourth of the population survived. What distinguished one group from the other?

In our own time, AIDS has devastated a generation of homosexual men and is now working on another. Yet other gay men, who have partied just as much, remain HIV-negative. How come?

People do not want to believe that a basic explanatory principle of the universe is chance. They want to believe that there are “explanations” for all sorts of things from the daily movement of stock prices to who wins and who loses in the game of life.

No one can predict with certainty whether the stock market will go up or down tomorrow. No one can predict what tomorrow’s headline will be.

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Rescher brings the philosopher’s clarity of thought and analysis to these matters. Unfortunately, though, he spends too much time defining his terms and explaining the difference, for example, between being lucky and being fortunate. And he does not spend nearly enough time exploring why so many people find it impossible to accept that luck is inherently unpredictable and unexplainable.

We are always looking for simple causes to explain things, even when there are none. Rescher speaks of “people’s instinctive disinclination to concede that portentous developments may be due to pure chance,” but he gives the subject short shrift.

As a result, his thoughtful book breaks little new ground. To be sure, some of his examples are interesting, but you come away not knowing a whole lot more about luck than you knew when you started.

Life, he says, “is in large measure a gamble--a game of chance, like roulette, rather than one of pure skill, like chess.” Which is not to say we shouldn’t make plans and act rationally. But Rescher reminds us that no matter how much we plan, our plans are frequently trumped by good or bad luck.

The world contains “an infinity of accidents,” Rescher says, and it is therefore radically uncertain. And if it were any other way, he adds, it would be terribly boring. “A degree of uncertainty is an important ‘spice of life.’ ” But many who are beset by bad luck would probably happily trade it for boredom.

The worst part, of course, is that luck frequently ignores our sense of justice. “Good luck often comes to the unworthy,” Rescher writes, “ill luck to those who deserve better.”

But you don’t have to read this book to know that.

Ecclesiastes tells us:

“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Rescher tells us no more.