Up From These Hills is a memoir of the life of Leonard Carson Lambert Jr., a Cherokee Indian who lived on and off the reservation in North Carolina and parts of Tennessee. He was raised in poverty, born in 1932 as a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This is an account of his family and their struggles during the depression. Readers with interest in the indigenous people of America, their culture and the preservation of that culture will be drawn to this memoir. However, the story is a disappointment. Expectations held promise for a rare and unique point of view. Instead it was a lackluster family saga that was difficult to plod through. If the reader gains anything from this memoir it would be that the author’s family is not unique, but rather an average American family suffering through the hardships of the Great Depression. Lambert’s writing is unimaginative failing to paint any descriptions that the reader can envision. Readers will have to search deep to find a spark that makes this better than just another banal family history.

Wisteria Leigh
December 15, 2011 ( )