During a discussion on his then-new book The Zone of Interest, author Martin Amis stated the idea that if you consider yourself a “serious thinker” or are someone who thinks at all, one of the very few things you should ever be thinking about is the Shoah. Few statements are so simple, powerful, and valid.

Yet besides rudimentary inclusion of the subject in primary school education — at least in the US — the impetus of centering the Shoah at the forefront of all our thinking is lacking. Faced with murder on a scale never before or since met, the path of least resistance for most lies in allowing the crime to fade into the background; never forgotten, but not often thought about, either.

Content in statements such as “never again” and the knowledge that others are looking after the subject, it can be easy to avoid grappling with the practicality of ensuring “never again” holds as more than a truism. Beyond the matter of avoiding a repeat of the complex of mistakes that enabled Nazi massacres, there are also the ripple effects from the fallout that shaped and will continue to shape our world today.

So where, then, do you begin? The countless questions that can be asked of the Shoah have brought into being countless numbers of books, films, museums, and monuments. Finding a starting place in this wall of work is daunting, although the gravity of the task at hand — to be a witness to tragedy no matter how removed — makes beginning somewhere a necessity. Why? Explaining the Holocaust by Peter Hayes may prove as good a place as any.

For those who have read much on the Shoah (also known as “The Holocaust” in English — a term which can also be used to encompass the murders of non-Jews under Nazi auspices), there may not be much that is new in Hayes’s work. Its strengths lie in its ability to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. Structured around seven main questions ranging from, “Why the Jews” to, “What Legacies, What Lessons” Why? aims to give readers a comprehensive overview of the reality of the killings as we understand them now, while dispelling myths that so often tend to try to shift some blame on the victims themselves.

It is a well-written work, although the enormity of the subject means there are shortcomings. The book is open in its goal of avoiding being too bound up in the inevitable emotional storm such events started from and would generate. While that is admirable from a purely academic perspective, I think there is a risk of a reader coming away from Why? feeling, well, cold. Or maybe the way to describe it is inexplicably cold.

While it succeeds at breaking up misconceptions about the capacity of the Jews to fight back or the ability of the Allied powers to intervene long before 1945, I wonder if there isn’t some fundamental flaw in the design here. That isn’t to say Hayes doesn’t take the pain and suffering seriously — far from it. Perhaps it is my failing as a reader, expecting a book such as this to inherently foreground the emotional weight of the topic on almost every page.

And yet, if something like the Shoah will be the subject of your book, even one designed to place it under the cold lens of academic rigor, can the means of emotional isolation damage the ends of trying to prevent a repeat? I applaud Hayes for his work and do believe it a strong starting point for further readings, but it is ultimately just that. A place to begin finding the answer “why?” Not the end.