This series seems to be some misguided attempt to morph library books with text books.  It really is a clearly written book about a topic of high interest to many students.  I would recommend it if they hadn’t gone and stuck a bunch of textbook assignment questions at the end of every chapter.  These will be a turn-off to students, and are unlikely to be used by teachers — they don’t enhance the book, but instead detract from its appeal to recreational readers.  Another thing: I’m tired of books that list a sequence of dates along a line and call it a timeline — when I was taught to make timelines in elementary school, it was a requirement that the distance along the line be representative the of the time it was attempting to illustrate — when the same distance might represent one year or seventeen years along the same line, it’s missing the point of a timeline.