The history of 20th-century Imperialism is littered with the corpses of "radical movements" and state-authored ghost stories of their participants and ideologies. Some such movements were snuffed out completely, but others found a powerful voice and spread around the globe.

In his book Pinnacle: The Lost Paradise of Rasta, Bill "Blade" Howell, with the help of his co-author Helene Lee, sets the record straight on perhaps the most widely known -- and widely misunderstood -- Afrocentric religion in the world. Howell's father was Leonard Percival Howell. The senior Howell was a contemporary of Marcus Garvey in 1920s New York, and he added a religious element to Garvey's Pan-African teachings, which would eventually develop into the religion known round the world as Rastafari.

In 1940 Leonard Howell purchased an estate on the mountainside outside of Spanish Town, Jamaica, where he, his family and his followers established a community known to the world as Pinnacle. For 16 years, around 1,600 people lived peacefully and cooperatively according to Leonard Howell's teachings.

Bill Howell was born in Pinnacle in 1942 and lived there for 14 years. Here he provides a simple, no-nonsense account of his life in the village, which doesn't sound too different from any other rural village in a developing nation in the mid-20th century. Howell lovingly recalls how everyone took care of each other, lived without judgment and co-existed peacefully. He explains how his father fed every member of the community for the first two years while they created a self-sufficient agrarian community from the ground up. He also chronicles his father's many run-ins with the law, with careful recollection of Leonard's side of the story.

Perhaps most importantly, he addresses misconceptions about the tenets and values of his father's teachings. According to "Blade," the rules governing life and spirituality at Pinnacle bear little resemblance to the fourth-hand recountings of what "Rastafarianism" means to most of us.

When Bill Howell was thrown out onto the streets of Kingston for good in 1956, he was a scared, bitter teenager in a dangerous place. His daily occupation was mere survival. Little has been told about life at Pinnacle, and the oppressive Imperial British propaganda machine was all too happy to fill in the blanks with lies and fear-mongering. Academic interest in Pinnacle and the real-world historical foundations of Rastafari took decades to emerge, and Howell has finally decided it is time to tell his story. I am thankful he has.

The stories in this book will be largely impossible for interested journalists to fact-check, though Bill explains how endless police harassment and a powerful contemporary establishment narrative eradicated what primary source documents may have existed to begin with. Instead, if we are interested in untangling the "truth" of Rastafari and the Pinnacle settlement, we must rely on the half-century-old recollections of a man who was merely a teenager when the community was broken up.

Truth is conditional, and it is contextual. But it is still important. If we are to ever discover the "truth" about anything in the post-information age, we have to ask ourselves how much personal stories still matter. I believe they still matter quite a bit. In fact, I believe they are all that truly does.