This attempt at a great American novel by a former humanities professor from Reed College strikes out. It is not great. It is not good. It is self-indulgent, illiterate and ae-entertaining. It is not a novel but a collection of reminiscences from an educated man who found his greatest happiness in the company of the unwashed and uneducated, whose experiences he tries to detail. A totally wasted effort. Don't waste either your money or time with this one.

This volume is a pedantic and tremendous bore by a self-indulgent author. A total waste of time.

Those looking for a pleasant, unchallenging read that recycles the familiar cliches about cowboys and the American West should stick to Louis L'Amour. Welcome to the real west, where cowboys are not noble herdsmen or romantic leading men but dusty, manure-splattered, underpaid, overworked hired men. This is a memoir, not a novel, written by a man who lived the life he describes. Set in central Nevada in the 1950s, Ulph creates a vivid portrait of the land, the people, and the work as he experienced them. He is not attempting to please some real or imagined "audience" for his book, he is simply telling his story, the way it really happened.

The opening paragraphs of the book encapsulate his style and approach: a group of cowboys, camping on the open range, are awakened in the pre-dawn hours by a loud explosion and a sudden burst of light over the mountains to the east. So far, so good: we've been introduced to the characters and the setting, and an intriguing, unexplained event has just taken place that will surely set some sort of a plot in motion. Right? Wrong. It's 1953, and a nuclear device has just been detonated on the Nevada Test Range, a couple of valleys over from the ranch. The cowboys yawn, rise from their bedrolls, and set about another day's work. This scene (a 19th-century pastoral lifestyle bumping up against the Atomic Age) lets the reader know, right away, that the story is about the end of an era, just as the post-World War II "boom" was beginning to transform the West and overrun its traditional land uses and occupations.

Hey, I love "Lonesome Dove" and "Red River" and all those other books and movies we're all familiar with. I know the fiction, but I find the reality far more interesting. Owen Ulph presents us with a book that is driven by character and setting, not some sort of artificial plot; that provides us with an unblinking look at one of the most famous yet least well-understood professions in America, that of the working cowboy (not the rodeo or drug-store variety); and sets it all in the enormity and heart-stopping beauty of the Basin and Range country at a time of fundamental social and economic change. His is one of the few authentic literay voices of the American West: a sagebrush Norman MacLean, perhaps, or (in his feel for character and comic dialogue) a modern Mark Twain. Dramatic, witty, incisive, powerful, elegiac for a vanishing way of life but clear-eyed and unsentimental, "The Leather Throne" is a modern classic of Western literature in general and cowboy life in particular.

Reading this book is a bit like trying chipotle sauce for the first time. It's not what you were expecting (no matter what you were expecting), and it may not be to everybody's taste. But there's no denying its strong, distinctive flavor.

The last reviewer almost got it almost right. Dr. Ulph was a cowpoker who poked one too many cows.

The writing of Mr. Ulph is too abstract and leaves too much to the imagine. Pity, he takes topics with interest and potential and then slowly loses the reader's interest by infusing his own personality into the word paintings he is trying to draw.

The professional reviewers of this work are correct in their high opinions. In this work, Dr. Ulph, a Professor of History at Reed College, shares observations of the life of a cowpoke. Although the book is based on historical lore, Dr. Ulph infuses the text with his personal knowledge based on owning an eastern Oregon ranch on which he poked cows for many years. His sometimes cynical observations on the realities of this difficult life are quite appropriate, even if they may offend some readers who want romance rather than reality in their depiction of the old west.