“Ever wanted to continue a conversation with a lifelong friend who has died? Impossible, you say! Not for cardiologist and author Roger Mills and his Amherst College classmate and rowing partner from fifty years ago—the accomplished European research biologist Bernard Witholt. This book was born two years after Witholt’s death, when his widow shared his journal about living with an “unruly heart” (that occasionally raced at 240 beats per minute) with Mills. 240 Beats per Minute recounts an extraordinary conversation—the combination of Bernie’s journal and Roger’s commentary. It’s a read of such continuing surprise, discovery, triumph, and, in the end, mutual understanding and respect, that we readers become the luckiest of eavesdroppers: Long after we finish Life with an Unruly Heart, Bernie and Roger’s conversation will live in our minds.” —Paul Dimond, lawyer and author of The Belle of Two Arbors and Beyond Busing, winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Book of the Year Award