Not really. Very cursory factual accounts. I am very visual in my thinking so the book was mostly written by memory. All I had to do was think of a person and the scene would just come alive. I also have over 500 photos from the trip and I went through them to help jog my memory. It's a cinematic style of prose. And my goal was to transport the reader. So you get on the plane with me from Seattle and as you read along, you are taking a virtual trip with me every step of the way, seeing, hearing, smelling all the things that I was discovering as a newcomer. Even if you have never been to the Mideast or have no desire to go, by the time you've finished the book, you will feel as if you've just come back from Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Damascus, Istanbul. you'll probably be exhausted as I was when I came back to Seattle, but I think you'll really have a sense of what these places were like beyond what you might have known from reading a newspaper or watching CNN.