Jonathan Wickham was born in Malawi, a small country bordering the giant lake that fills the end of the Great Rift Valley. He spent his first twelve years there and in neighboring Zimbabwe before moving to the UK, where he completed his education. With a degree in French and German from Cambridge University, he initially considered becoming a language teacher. But a year spent living in West Berlin, with frequent visits to the movies, convinced him that he should become a filmmaker. After film school back in the UK, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, just as Turner Broadcasting and CNN were taking off. He has spent most of his career in the US, producing documentaries for television. Several of those documentaries focused on World War II. Now, in his first book, Jonathan explores how history's greatest conflict affected someone close to him-and ultimately himself too.
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In his evocative "Ten Days That Shook My World," English-documentarian Jonathan Wickham, trading camera for notebook, leaves his American home for a pilgrimage to Africa, where he was born and spent his childhood. In Ethiopia, for ten memorable days, the white journalist reconnoiters the World-War-II paths of his late father, a soldier in the Royal Artillery. Heartfelt and passionate, "Ten Days" is a poignant, first-person story of a man recovering native soil as well as a son's discovery of harrowing tales of war his taciturn father never shared. -- -Tom Chaffin, author of Odyssey: Young Charles Darwin, The Beagle, and the Voyage that Changed the World "Ten Days That Shook My World" weaves together superbly Wickham's travels in this most unique of African countries in which, to quote the writer, the present and the past 'are constantly communicating with each other'. His story will strike a particular chord with anyone with Africa deep in their veins, -- General Richard Shirreff, Author of War with Russia: An Urgent Warning from Senior Military Command In Ten Days That Shook My World, author Jonathan Wickham sets out to discover how his father's artillery battalion alongside other British imperial forces' joined local Patriot fighters in the campaign to liberate Ethiopia from Mussolini's Fascist grasp. The result was the earliest, yet often forgotten, Allied victory of the Second World War. Some 80 years later, in his first-person account, Wickham deftly interweaves the progress of the campaign into his own present-day adventure. I thoroughly enjoyed his first-person account of his experiences, conversations and observations about the history of Ethiopia from ancient to modern times. What particularly struck me is that we need more such studies of the fighting in both East and West Africa, which has been virtually ignored, overshadowed by the campaign against Rommel in North Africa. I found the book to be compelling, enlightening, and highly readable, and would recommend it without reservation to all potential readers. -- John H. Morrow, Jr., Franklin professor of history at University of Georgia & recipient of the 2019 Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. I have been an explorer for my entire life, as has author Jonathan Wickham, who has joined me on some shared adventures. These have not only uncovered lost chapters of human history but have also led to a better understanding of what lies within each and every one of us. His new book "10 Days That Shook My World" is a vivid example of that process! [66 words] -- Dr. Robert Ballard, scientist and undersea explorer, celebrated for his discoveries of long-lost shipwrecks, including RMS Titanic, the German World War II battleship Bismarck