Doctor Dolittle's Puddleby Adventures (1952)-- The last Dolittle book to be released was, like its immediate predecessor, actually a collection of Lofting material from the mid-1920's. All of its individual pieces had been previously published in the New York Herald Tribune, and, put together, they form a different sort of Dolittle book from what we're used to. For each of the animal stories in Puddleby Adventures is a self-contained episode, and among them they represent a variety of periods in Dolittle's career. The Doctor is even reduced to a "supporting character" in some of them. In the absence of a continuous plot-line, editor Fricker attempts to give unity to the book with the suggestion that Tom Stubbins has been the assembler of the disparate collection. More to come... |