A day in the night of America

The night has become America's new frontier. From Wall Street brokers to next-day-mail carriers, from movie crews to bank workers processing tomorrow's checks, America is challenging the clock. No longer the sole province of policemen, office cleaners, and 7-Eleven clerks, the hours from midnight to dawn now draw more than seven million Americans to work - many in white-collar jobs. Kevin Coyne traveled from Massachusetts to Alaska in search of the new nighttime work.

Ethic. He sorted packages for Federal Express, rode with tugboat operators on Puget Sound, listened to Trappist monks chant psalms on a Utah mountain, trolled with herring fishermen, hunted poachers with a game warden, monitored market shifts with Wall Street currency traders, and saw the sunrise with the "working girls" at a plush Nevada bordello. The result is an intimate and extraordinary journey that captures the mood, the feel, and the texture of America after hours.

- and reveals what really happens when most of us switch off the lights. A Day in the Night of America is a beautifully written and thoroughly absorbing journey into the upside-down world of the 7.3 million Americans who work the night shift.