I somehow ended up reading a few peer review articles on JSTOR recently, and the tone was... not friendly, to say the least. A few bits:
This short book thus bears the burden of immense ambition which it miserably fails to deliver. [...]
Her treatment of Islam would give apoplexy to any scholar of Islam. In the absence of any primary research, [the author] reproduces highly questionable generalisations of authors whose primary interest in the history of the region is anything but religious history. Thus we have astoundingly bland statements such as [...]
The account is riddled with so many factual errors that the author's integrity is compromised. To pick a few examples at random (a full catalogue would probably take up a volume of at least half the size of the book under review) [...]
(Sorry to the mods if this is against any citation/copyright rules/laws)
As someone currently studying history, this, while funny, seems very intimidating. Is this tone par of the course for critical peer review? Or is this just a justified case of a reviewer being outraged at a fundamentally flawed body of work?
Peer review is the process of getting established experts to evaluate new contributions to their field. The result can run the gamut from very negative to very positive. At least in theory, all these outcomes are the result of the system working as intended: works of bad quality, which are the product of bad scholarship or biased perspectives, ought to be read critically, and their reviews often serve as a warning to the wider academic community. Similarly, positive reviews should be a sign of established academics embracing new insights because they recognise them as valuable contributions to their field.
The example you cited is certainly an extreme case. The author of the review sees significant problems with the scope, perspective, methodology, and argument of the work they were asked to review. This is not par for the course for works that have typically, by the time they are being reviewed for academic journals, already passed the publishers' peer review (determining whether the publisher will decide to offer the author a contract or not) as well as going through an extensive editing process. If this reviewer is being fair on the work, it ought to have triggered alarms at Palgrave before it was ever put to print.
More often, a reviewer will be asked to discuss both positive and negative aspects of a given work; they will usually discuss the ways in which a new work contributes to existing knowledge, and then outline some possible weaknesses or aspects that could have done with more detailed study. Sometimes a work is considered of such high quality that a reviewer struggles to find anything negative to mention. Here are some milder examples found through the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (one of the more prominent reviewing platforms in my field):
As my comments should have made clear, this is both from the historical and the methodological/historiographical point of view a very interesting book. Ma's discussions, while always starting from some specific document, are wide-ranging, full of insights and challenging (...) This is an engrossing book to read, very dense, beautifully written, and enormously rewarding for anyone interested in how language can shape power relations.
-- Paola Ceccarelli on John Ma's Antiochos III and the Cities of Western Asia Minor (1999)
The most obvious strength of Davidson's work is his intimate familiarity with a whole range of primary sources, which he sometimes uses in deft ways to make his points (...) on several occasions Davidson uses language that is not always particularly nuanced; yet it is frequently witty, often cheeky, and consistently engaging (...) Davidson's contribution is a notable milestone along the way.
-- E.C. Brook on James Davidson's The Greeks and Greek Love (2007)