Hi Brian,
if you want to educate yourself on evolution (or anything else, for that matter), I’d recommend reading about evolution itself, not about responses to dissenters. Studying the proponents’ works first should put you in a position to be able to evaluate the arguments of the dissenters for yourself. There’s no point reading the critiques or the responses to them until you are in a position to see if the critiques are justified.
I’d second Dawkins’ The ancestor’s tale, but also Steve Jones’ update of Darwin, Mayr’s What evolution is and Gould’s essay collections.
I’d also recommend a quick grounding in logical fallacies before cracking open even the first book on evolution, because generally only one side (proponents or dissenters) needs to resort to them.
Oh, and the quickest way to find out whether to believe the proponents or the dissenters is to follow their respective references and see who is credible.