I know that a lot of this is due to the time period during which this was written, but I found it irritating how ethnocentric this book was. Doctor Dolittle was portrayed as so very smart and the native people were portrayed as so very stupid. The version I read was modified to remove offensive terms for Africans, so I can't even imagine how much worse the original was. Still, the story was okay I suppose. And again, it was published in 1922, so I guess its ethnocentric themes are not THAT surprising. ( )