SOURCE: Nicholson, David. “Music to One's Eyes.” Washington Post Book World (22 July 1997): B6.

In the following review, Nicholson concludes that, despite the lack of a Gaelic glossary, Carson's Last Night's Fun is an “otherwise delightful read.”

“I cannot fix a linear chronology on these remembered tangled fragments,” Ciaran Carson writes about halfway through [Last Night's Fun,] this strange and wonderful little book. He's in the middle of an impressionistic account of days and nights playing music everywhere from airplanes to Chinese restaurants to public bathrooms (great acoustics!), but the words could serve as a summation for the entire book.

Part memoir, part meditation on Irish music, this collection of essays is awash with tall tales, jokes, etymological digressions, and the kind of lore about musical instruments and legendary musicians that accomplished practitioners accumulate over years of playing and hanging out with one another. While each essay is self-contained...