Pinnacle: The Lost Paradise of Rasta

Howell debuts with an erratic portrait of his father, Rasta movement founder Leonard Percival Howell (1898–1981), and the Rastafarian community he led near Kingston, Jamaica, from 1940 until it was disbanded in the late ’50s. Howell frames his childhood in the Pinnacle compound as idyllic, and the residents there as good citizens, claiming that the friction between Howell’s followers and other Jamaicans stemmed largely from harassment by colonial authorities who sought to undercut Howell’s influence. Interwoven with the story of the commune is valuable background on Rastafarianism’s origins in Marcus Garvey’s movement for African independence, from which it broke in the early 1930s when Howell designated Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I as “the Living God.” Unfortunately, the author’s alternately defensive and worshipful attitude toward his father yields some questionable conclusions, as when Howell writes of his father’s many romantic relationships, “one could argue Dada loved women too much to respect them, but he was a man of his times.... He was a Victorian gentleman and a lion all in one.” This falls short. (Aug.)