ONLY SON: A Memoir

When Johnson discovered that his father had lung cancer, he quit his high-profile anchor position at WNBC to be by his father's side. This momentous decision impels Johnson to explore his own life—specifically, the intense love-hate dynamic between his abusive father, "Black Jack," and his alcoholic mother, Irene—in a narrative frightening in its emotional intensity. Those seeking a charming memoir of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in the 1950s and '60s, or a juicy exposé of television journalism, had best look elsewhere. This is a close-grained and often claustrophobic portrait of one family's close-to-tragic life. The outside world, filled with gangs, schemers and racists, offers no escape for the Johnsons, and thus seems unimportant in their suffocating drama. Johnson does not overly elaborate on the links between his family's harsh living circumstances and his mother's depression, his father's frustration or his own unrelenting ambition; instead, he evokes a child's incomprehension. "His outbursts bewildered me because I did nothing to provoke them. I didn't smoke or steal or get anyone pregnant. I came home at the appointed hour. I toed the line in every way.... My father was like a foreign crossword puzzle. I couldn't read the clues, much less solve the damn thing." Thrust into a caretaker position at much too young an age, Johnson shouldered too much of the family's guilty weight—a role that explains his relentless ambition, but which also crippled him emotionally. "I was the son of an alcoholic and a sexual predator, yet their message came through: I was to be something! I didn't become a mugger or a drug addict. Some good things must have happened in our household, and my dad was a part of them, too." Johnson, writing with Coplon (who contributed to Tina Sinatra's My Father's Daughter), has created an impressive portrait of tenacity, fury and ambition, and reconciliation within an inescapable family frame. (June)