From the Table of Contents, the similarities with Norvig’s Principles of Artificial Intelligence Programming in terms of topics covered are striking. Seems like building up to a Prolog interpreter is a thing in Lisp programming books.
This was during a period of language research where Scheme in Scheme in Scheme was being used to look in to how to reflection (look into programs and how they behave).
The Little Lisper was a starting point for students to learn lisp (or Scheme) and get used to tail recursion and short focused functions.