How to stop patting yourself on the back

I stumbled into another one of these dreadful reviews in which the writer breaks his arm patting himself on the back for reading a long work of fast-paced, novelistic nonfiction:

Author Stephen W. Sears delivers a truly remarkable piece of scholarship in "Gettysburg."

And you, my friend, must be a truly remarkable scholar yourself for noting the quality of scholarship in the truly remarkable studies of Stephen Sears!

I've got your scholarship right here, buddy and it's 15% off in aisle D.

I like the honesty and sincerity of this blogger:

Now history is my new comfort. Bad, popular history. Not some kinda super-intellectual stuff--but Time-Life Books-type history. I don't want to bother with complex analysis. I want maps, I want illustrations, I want travel photos of the charming ethnically-dressed peasants that now populate the places of history.

Thank you my dear. I wish the reviewers approving the super scholarship of such as Sears and McPherson would have the honesty to publish (as you did) the following about their own reading:

[Pop history gives me] [n]ot a good or useful perspective to understand current events but some imagined world to occupy from which to see this one. And it is fully imagined since I do not even begin to comprehend Alexander or his era or the things people thought were good ideas back then.

Perfect. Let's see that in an ACW book review: "Sears gives me a fully imagined world I cannot begin to comprehend since I don't read footnotes or do research myself." That beats crowing about all the "brilliant scholarship" packed into some beach reading.