The Place of the Yellow Woodpecker is the University of Florianopolis in Santa Catarina, Brazil in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the time of military rule. The writing is of the earth, reaching down into the culture, the poverty and hardship, and bridging to the outside, especially the US as a haven for escape - not to freedom, but to the home of a worshipped overlord of wealth and power, to be closer to that demigod and to share in the prosperity. Fox never shies away from showing the reader his true face, his sexuality, his peevish academic soul and his mystical yearning for oneness with the earth. It is a personal record of a place and time that is lost in the modern economic juggernaut which Brazil is becoming, while betraying the origins of its lingering self-loathing and self-doubt.