I am a history fanatic. Long a fan of this sub, but my love of history goes way back to childhood. I realize now that many of the books I have read were distortions for the sake of entertainment, or contained outdated information, ethnocentric perspectives and outright jingoist lies.
I believe that many of the fans of this sub are similar to myself in that they fall somewhere between the expert and the casual interest. Now I am reading Tony Judt's wonderful "Postwar." I am aware that he had a certain political perspective (one that closely follows my own, actually) and I do not want to get a single perspective.
Many of the [popular questions] (http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq) focus on whether an author (Gibbon, Pinker, Diamond, Chomsky...I wish Tuchman was among them) can be trusted. My question is, how can a fan of history who is not capable or interested in primary sources, do due diligence while reading secondary sources or popular histories?
E: My purpose is to keep from constantly asking "which is the best book on X?" or "is this author worth reading?" Currently, I use wiki sources for my reading list...which is much better than the old method of buying whatever was available in B Daltons before the invention of the internet. Thanks for the help in advance. Best sub on reddit!
Read a couple reviews of the book. Not on amazon or goodreads, but on JSTOR or google scholar. Search the title of the book and see if any book reviews of it come up in academic journals. Proper journals will have titles like American Historical Review or Journal of Modern History (PostWar was reviewed in both). Most reviews won't be 100% positive (they tend to be very formulaic and part of that formula is including a couple of criticisms), but if the reviews generally say things like "thoroughly-researched" or "good contribution to the field of x," then it's probably a decently scholarly book, although you should still read it critically. If the book has been published for a year or longer and you can't find any reviews of the book in a major academic journal, then it's probably safe to say that it's less scholarly or academic and more popular.
Also check to see who published the book. It's not always true but generally a book published by a University Press (Oxford UP, Chicago UP, etc) is going to be more academic than a book published by HarperCollins.