In the tradition of The Color of Water, Triple Exposure delicately and poignantly reveals a snapshot of race, identity, and the complicated nuances surrounding both. Jeffries, growing up a "red-diaper baby" in the 1950s, the youngest son of socially active Communist parents--a Jewish mother and a black father. With a writing style alive with the rhythms and riffs of the jazz that helps him through the toughest times of his life, Jeffries deftly examines questions of identity, race, and family in a provocative, moving, and often hilarious memoir. Like Brent Staples in Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White, Dexter Jeffries begins asking from a very early age who he is. Too light to be black, too dark to be white, finding his place in race-conscious America will be a journey filled with anger, inner turmoil, and pain--but what a fascinating, challenging trip it turns out to be. In a loving, racially-mixed home where being progressive means not only having radical views, but acting on them, Dexter helps break through the color line at nine years old when he is among the first group of black children bused to a white Queens neighborhood. But it was much earlier, at the age of five, that he had his first identity crisis, caught in the limbo between black and white and fitting in neither world. Therapy, a name change, a stint in the U.S. Army, and jobs ranging from cab driver to filmmaker and English Professor are all stops along the way as Dexter Jeffries portrays the forces that forged his character and beliefs. While his brother becomes a James Dean-type rebel bent on self-destruction and his sister emulates Richard Wright as an expatriate in Mexico and Europe, Dexter follows his ownpath, discovering conflicts that have as much in common with Kafka as Ellison. In fact, in literature he finds a window into truth, and the message--conveyed by Joyce, Thoreau, and DuBois--that will change everything.