"Can either of you recommend a good Church history book?"
Eusebius Pamphilius' Ecclesiastical History is the best place to start. He records the first 300 years of the history of the Church and there was nothing like a modernist agenda back then for him to lead you astray!
Its available from Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1565633717/qid=1115400003/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-9491652-0804107?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
From a Catholic perspective, the best, fairest, overall, is Warren H. Carroll, History of Christendom (Christendom College Press, Front Royal, Va), of which 4 volumes have appeared, up to the 16thc. Carroll is a well-trained European historian who integrates Church history extremely well into "profane" history.
There's a very good new project, currently complete up to the 1100s, to produce a "Time-Life" illustrated, dynamically written history of Christianity that pulls no punches on Islam etc. and seeks to tell the story in a manner fair to orthodox Catholics, Orthodox, and Evangelical Protestants alike: where they each tell parts of the story differently, the series tries to simply tell the two or three versions and leave it at that. Each volume is vetted by both Protestant Evangelical and faithful Catholic academic experts but is written by journalists who know how to tell a gripping story. It can be found at www.christianhistoryproject.com
H. W. Crocker, Triumph goes too far in pro-Catholic apologetics, in my view, though it has much to offer. Philip Hughes's older Catholic history is quite good. From the Protestant side, Roland Bainton's two volume history of the church (exact title not at hand) is good--it's out of print, unfortunately. Paul Johnson's one-volume, despite Johnson's own Catholic faith, is very anti-clerical and pro-English, anti-Spain and highly idiosyncratic (he believes that a Third Way represented by Erasmus and the Hermeticists would have been better tha either Protestant or Catholic approaches--that's a utopian pipe dream that would have made things even worse, in my view).