RIGHT PLACES, RIGHT TIMES: 40 Years in Journalism, Not Counting My Paper Route <i> by Hedley Donovan (Henry Holt: $27.95; 463 pp.) </i>

It’s surprising, actually, how frequently one can tell a book by its cover. The dust jacket for the memoirs of Hedley Donovan, former editor-in-chief of Time, Inc., is a reliable guide to the book it encloses; both the title and the author’s expression as it appears on the back cover manage to be smirking and modest at the same time. Like the various magazines for which Donovan wrote and edited over nearly 35 years of Time employment, “Right Places, Right Times” is breezy, often interesting, a little imperious and more than a little self-conscious.

Donovan starts off badly, devoting the first chapter to managerial advice more appropriate to a business book and referring twice within the first eight pages to his apparently excessive modesty. Things subsequently brighten up, however, for the Minnesota-born author has led a singular life: three years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, four years covering FDR for the Washington Post, four years in Naval Intelligence, then the position at Fortune that eventually led to his anointment as Henry Luce’s successor.

The book is instructive, for it shows how journalists can be transformed from skeptical outsiders into compliant insiders. It’s hard to avoid the sense that the higher Donovan climbed, the more deeply he came to believe that “the news” is largely what important people say and do, and that the principal job of Time Inc. editors is to define the adjective “important.” By the last few chapters, Donovan’s life seems a series of carefully orchestrated meetings with world figures (Golda Meir, Tito, Deng Xiaoping, Castro, Sadat and many more) and ceremonial events (May Day in Moscow, guerrilla-tunnel crawling in Vietnam, receptions everywhere) interspersed with flurries of memo-writing. Donovan quotes at length many of his editorial critiques of Time Inc. publications, and while they are detailed and observant, they highlight the fact that Donovan is unwilling to probe his own professional choices and actions with the rigor he once routinely sought from others.