His two lay books, Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, are only samples of his work.  If you want to judge him, read his technical book Dynamic Hedging, and his published papers, starting at SSRN.com:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_d… (There are actually 14 papers total, but 6 aren't showing up on this page.  Search the main search field on SSRN.com for ‘Taleb’ for the complete list)

His website also has a section on his scholarly work as well:

http://fooledbyrandomness.com/

Regarding his credibility in academia, besides Terry Tao's informal endorsement (or whatever you consider Terry's static sidebar link to Taleb's main non-book work to be), the late Berkeley statistician David Freedman also commented in a posthumously published paper that "efforts by statisticians to refute Taleb proved unconvincing."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dav…