To recant is to take back a belief in public, under pressure, in front of the people who demanded the reversal. The word carries an older sense underneath the modern one. It comes from the Latin for singing again, and the act it names is a song performed backward, on command, so that the saying can stand in for the truth. In My Mind I'm Standing Up is a history of that act, traced from the Inquisition and the Reformation through the Moscow show trials, the Hollywood blacklist, and the Maoist struggle session, and into the public apology of our own moment.

The book takes the single act apart and asks what makes a person perform it. The answer is always a threat, and the threats sort themselves by what they aim at: life, livelihood, belonging, and the home itself. Galileo kneels and swears the earth stands still. Thomas Cranmer signs away his faith and then holds the signing hand into the fire first. Nikolai Bukharin confesses in a Moscow courtroom to crimes he never committed. Screenwriters trade the names of their friends for the right to work again. Across every case the question is the same: what does a forced word prove, and what does it cost the people who demand it?

Its answer is plain. A confession produced by pressure tells you only that the pressure was real, and a society that prizes the spectacle of someone unsaying himself has already traded honesty for obedience. The book sides with the refusers, the ones who said the required words aloud and kept the truth in private, and the ones who would not say them at all. The title comes from a child who, told to sit down, obeys and then says that in her mind she is standing up.