Deciding to See - by Nathan Vass (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Deciding to See: The View from Nathan's Bus is an eye-opening, inspiring, and hopeful linked-essay collection recounting the amazing everyday encounters of city bus driver, Nathan Vass whose life's motto is if you give kindness, you'll get kindness. Vass tests this theory on the roughest nighttime routes in Seattle. The results illuminate the challenges of poverty, homelessness, and crossing class boundaries. Vass intertwines personal stories of trauma from his survival of the 2015 Paris terror attacks, showing that we are all struggling with tragedy. These brief but meaningful encounters foster healing for everyone involved. The ordinary becomes extraordinary when he chooses to see the beauty of each person who steps onto his bus. Come along for the ride.

Review Quotes

Replete with kindness, humility, gratitude, and wonder, Deciding to See delivers what only the greatest of memoir can: a polished, sparkling lens. Through it, readers will see both subject and author, and they will observe that Nathan Vass has written an essential guidebook on how to be human--how to live, and perhaps how to die.

--Clayton Page Aldern, author of The Weight of Nature

This book is an antidote to cynicism. Vass weaves personal history--including his experience surviving the terrorist attacks in Paris on 2015, and being listed as missing, presumed dead--and stories from his two decades as a driver on Seattle's most colorful bus route into a moving argument for empathy. As a longtime bus driver, Vass treats even his most troublesome riders--the ones who stumble in drunk, screaming at their kids, or try to climb out the windows--like friends, a radical approach to a job that can breed misanthropy.

In Seattle, as in a lot of cities, fentanyl is causing a new but familiar kind of crisis, and many have chosen to write off its victims as hopeless cases who brought their troubles on themselves. By treating every passenger as someone with dignity and their own human story, Vass shows how kindness (even, sometimes, through gritted teeth) can create connections and improve the lives of people who tend to get written off. I know this, in part, because I rode Nathan's bus at a time when I was visibly struggling, and his friendly, nonjudgmental greeting was often the best thing about my day.
--Erica C. Barnett, author of Quitter: A Memoir of Drinking, Relapse, and Recovery