Clinton reads Heinberg on peak oil

This week in the magazine, David Remnick profiles Bill Clinton. Here, with Blake Eskin, Remnick discusses the ex-President’s legacy and Hillary Clinton’s political future.

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Bill Eskin: You write that Clinton rejected Gerald Ford as a model for the post-Presidency. But is Clinton at all a man of leisure?

David Remnick: He plays a hell of a lot of golf and he’s a voracious reader. His library’s got a lot of books about policy, a lot of history, a lot of Presidential biography, and a lot of books on religion—that’s a sincere interest. His taste in fiction, although I don’t think it’s limited to this, seems to be of a lower brow: he loves thrillers and police novels and stuff like that.

I borrowed a book from him that he had just read—“The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies,” by Richard Heinberg, not exactly summer reading—and it was full of underlinings and what looked like the most serious undergraduate’s markings, with lots of exclamation points.