THE LIFE I LED: The Editor of America’s Most Beloved Magazine Tells His Inside, Intimate Story. By Ralph Graves. Tiasquam Press, New York, N.Y. 2010. 216 pages. $12.50.

Beginning back before televi sion, before news and images came to us instantaneously as they do now, literally in the palm of our hand and from thousands of sources, the world was brought to us by LIFE magazine.

By trailblazing the art of photojournalism LIFE magazine illuminated vast corners of the world and its people and delivered the images to millions of living rooms every week. It was, as Ralph Graves writes in his new book, “the most popular, most beloved magazine in America.”

Mr. Graves had a fascinating career at a magazine that for decades had its bold and colorful finger on the pulse of the world. He travelled the world with acclaimed photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White, dined with Presidents Johnson and Carter and became friends with Charles Lindbergh and Norman Mailer, all back in the day when long, martini lunches were still fashionable. It sounds like a lot of fun and it was, according to his account in The LIFE I Led, The Editor of America’s Most Beloved Magazine Tells His Inside, Intimate Story.

Mr. Graves somewhat inadvertently took a job as a researcher at LIFE magazine right out of college in 1948. He became the magazine’s managing editor, it’s last, in 1969. He describes the book not as a history of LIFE, an autobiography or a career memoir, but as “a highly personal, highly opinionated testament,” a loving salute to the magazine with “that famous logo, block capital white letters against a bright red field.”

In a crisp and friendly voice he revisits the highs and lows of his career, from a growing love of opera and a deep respect for the controversial opera great Maria Callas to a scalding hoax involving a phony autobiography of Howard Hughes.

Over the years Mr. Graves looked at “many thousands of pictures and helped pick the ones that we published. Many, many marvelous pictures that people still remember: tragic, beautiful, heartbreaking, hilarious, shocking, newsworthy, historical.”

He writes that the most moving story he worked on involved not one great photograph but 217 small ones; “... together, row on row, over twelve pages, they broke everybody’s heart.” It was a piece entitled One Week’s Dead, and the pictures were of 217 Vietnam War soldiers who had died during one week in June 1969, at a time when emotions about the war were both mixed and raw. The concept is familiar to us now, but at the time it was a stunning first.

Mr. Graves is a longtime seasonal Island resident. Mr. Eisenstaedt, or Eisie, also had a long and loving Island connection. Mr. Graves writes that on “One cold gray December day in the office, one of us said, ‘I wonder what it’s like now at the Vineyard?’. . . We both knew at once it was a story: What happens to a popular summer resort in the winter?” And so it happened on the pages of LIFE.

Of the many jobs he held at LIFE Mr. Graves enjoyed working in the Nature Department where he came up with story ideas, assigned photographers and often accompanied them on the shoots. Animals, he writes, “always made such great pictures.” His favorite job was articles editor; he writes of his experiences with Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer.

He also shares the everyday challenges of how stories came to be and of good ones that failed to make the cut; he presents keen portraits of many talented LIFE photographers.

LIFE magazine was closed down in 1972, due largely to competition from television and other economic forces. Sadly, its era had slipped away.

What captured the national interest, Mr. Graves writes, is that “LIFE tried to be a bridge of understanding between people who need to know more about each other.” In closing, he adds, the need for such a bridge still exists.

“We tried to to talk to people of all barriers and special interests . . . who share the common experience of humanity . . . For understanding one another is truly in our national interest.”

Mr. Graves is the author of close to a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction. In 1995 he collaborated with artist Ray Ellis on Martha’s Vineyard: An Affectionate Memoir. His fiction includes The Lost Eagle, August People, and Champagne Kisses, Cyanide Dreams. The LIFE I Led feels like a perfect addition to his body of work.