I will freely and gleefully recommend Destiny Disrupted. It's eminently readable, dryly humorous at times and greatly insightful. I have no idea how history is taught in your 'hood but here in These United States "the crusades" were "Europe trounces the shit out of Islam" and "the Ottoman Empire" is "that thing that somehow managed to spring up after we abandoned the Crusades." Ansary makes the point that "the crusades" were "oh, yeah, that thing that happened on the periphery while we were busy getting our asses kicked by Ghengis Khan" and "the Ottoman Empire" is "the political system that calcified and allowed Europe to slowly buy out the kingdom from the inside out."
Everyone's history books suck a big one. This is because the past is politicized and our national identities are tied up in our national heritage. I had impeccable history instruction but due to state law, two entire years are devoted to New Mexico state history. Worse, the state mandates a competency test prior to graduation, of which more than 50% of the content is tied to state history. It was fairly common for exchange students to come from Europe, either by themselves or with their theoretical physicist parents, and have their graduation in jeopardy because they didn't expect to be grilled for two hours on the parochial history of a meaningless backwater province. By way of contrast, most American history classes I've seen spend the last week on events between WWI and the Vietnam War... if they're lucky. It's not uncommon for classes running late to pretty much stop at V-J day.
I had a history teacher that assigned A People's History as supplementary reading and a history teacher who had worked on the Reagan campaign in alternating years. I think explicitly politicized history worked out better for me than implicitly politicized history does for kids who get history teachers that play it straight.