The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up
By Jacob M. Appel
Arnold Brinkman is a shy, retiring Greenwich Village botanist who loves his plants more than his country. So when a stadium camera broadcasts him refusing to stand for “God Bless America” at a Yankees game, and he compounds the sin by sticking out his tongue, he assumes the whole silly business will blow over by morning.
But it does not. Overnight he becomes a tabloid villain besieged on his own doorstep, thrown into a world of pushy patriots, opportunistic preachers, and ravenous press. His marriage frays, his business wobbles, the police mass outside, and a city that will forgive almost anything refuses to forgive a man who won’t say he’s sorry.
Jacob M. Appel’s prescient first novel, previously published in 2012 by Cargo Publishing, was the winner of the 2012 Dundee International Book Prize and the 2013 International Rubery Book Award.
Jacob M. Appel is currently Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, where he is Director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry, Associate Director of the Academy for Medicine and the Humanities, and Medical Director of the Mental Health Clinic at the East Harlem Health Outreach Program. Jacob is the author of five literary novels, ten short story collections, two volumes of poems, an essay collection, a cozy mystery, a thriller, and a compendium of dilemmas in medical ethics. He is Vice President and Treasurer of the National Book Critics Circle, co-chair of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry’s Committee on Psychiatry & Law, and a Councilor of the New York County Psychiatric Society and of the American Academy of Psychiatry & Law. More at: www.jacobmappel.com.