Worst pop-historian you've read/consumed in some fashion?

[Zinneke]

I don't rate Niall Ferguson much.

[Senator Incitatus]

Ron Chernow’s The House of Morgan is one of the worst reads I’ve ever attempted. I recommend the much superior academic history The Morgans: Private International Bankers, 1854-1913 by Vincent Carosso.

Having skimmed his other work, I’m left with the impression that Chernow only covers well-known figures so that he can plagiarize and dumb down better works by academics, and his writing talent isn’t strong enough (like, e.g., Morris) to justify it. I think he would be totally lost writing about anything even moderately obscure.

[quesaisje]

Most are bad, to the point that it's hard to pick one. Go to any seller of new books and pick one off of the history shelves at random. As likely as not, you'll have a plausible candidate in your hands. It takes work to find the good ones.

Instead, I'll name a work of popular history that I read recently and liked: John Adams and the American Revolution by Catherine Drinker Bowen, published in 1950.

This was a well-worn first edition hardcover from a box of books that my grandfather had put aside for me many years ago. It was beautifully written, contained enough quotations from primary sources not to feel completely like an exercise in creativity, and had a nice afterword on the author's research and writing methods. The bibliography wasn't scholarly, but it was thorough and well-organized enough to lead a reader to other works.

[John Dule]

Howard Zinn.

[Blow by blow, the passion dies]

Aventuras na História, a Brazilian blog.

[LM Brazilian Citizen]

Leandro Narloch (he isn't a historian; but a Brazilian journalist and columnist with very right-wing views, among these views, in one of his books, he justified the Brazilian military dictatorship as a necessary evil, arguing that it killed many fewer people than the communist countries that Brazilian guerrillas sympathized). 

[Aurelius2]

Jon Meacham is godawful. I learned almost nothing from his Jefferson bio.

[LM Brazilian Citizen]

Aventuras na História, a Brazilian blog.

It was once a good blog (and magazine, I read some editions in my youth) when it came to historical subjects, but recently (not so recently) it embraced some pop culture material in VERY bad taste.

[Alben Barkley]

Jon Meacham is godawful. I learned almost nothing from his Jefferson bio.

Fighting words.

Also his Jackson bio is his masterwork.

[wnwnwn]

Would you consider Carl Grimberg a pop historian?
Not like his books are bad, but they are very popular in LATAM.

Maybe Acemoglu and Robinson, if you consider 'Why Nations Fail' as pop history.