Rating: 
Summary: Dogmatic, esoteric, and confused best describes it!
Review: Just like the artwork and poetry of the 21th century,this book is confused, vague, and vulger. Sartre defines his many self-styled words with themselves. He makes philosophical claims without backing them up in much the same way that theological books have asserted religious dogma in the past. Sartre's work is, and will continue to be enigmatic, not because it is deep or complex, but because it is obtuse.
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Summary: The existencialism reference
Review: Just read it. If you think you know the 20th century way of thinking and you have not read this book: you are wrong, man.
Rating:
Summary: Buy the ugly white cover, not the orange one.
Review: Not because the white one is better. They are the same translation. The orange one is ABRIDGED, which is mentioned nowhere on this website, as if the two books are the same.They don't even have the same publisher. Trust me: unless you can find the 1956 edition from the Philosophical Library, buy the white version from Washington Square Press. The Citadel Press edition is abridged and more expensive. Even if it has a nicer looking cover, don't buy it.
Rating:
Summary: Buy the ugly white cover, not the orange one.
Review: Not because the white one is better. They are the same translation. The orange one is ABRIDGED, which is mentioned nowhere on this website, as if the two books are the same. They don't even have the same publisher. Trust me: unless you can find the 1956 edition from the Philosophical Library, buy the white version from Washington Square Press. The Citadel Press edition is abridged and more expensive. Even if it has a nicer looking cover, don't buy it.
Rating: 
Summary: Difficult but rewarding
Review: Once you learn the semantic games that Sartre is playing with "you are what you are not" and so on, you get a sense of the urgency of existential philosophy. If you are seriously searching for a philosophy of life, existentialism is a great place to start, and this book is the cornerstone of existentialist thought. However, there is a God shaped hole in Sartre's philosophy that is never filled - being merely existential is not enough!
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Summary: Sartre: one of the last of the system builders....
Review: One of the most influential books of 20th-century philosophy, Being and Nothingness, and others by Sartre, has probably been read by more beginning students of philosophy than any other. Sartre's approach to philosophy is eclectic, but he has unique solutions to some of the problems he is attempting to solve, particularly his treatment of the problem of how to handle the negation, a problem of great interest to Hegel, and carried over to a phenomenological setting by Sartre. His discussion of the "experiencing" of negation has to rank as one of the most interesting in contemporary philosophy. It is a topic also that Sartre apparently thought so important that he included it in the first chapter of the book. He does however prepare the reader for the analysis in an introduction to the book. Therein, he argues for the dissolving of the distinction between being and appearance, and to reject (in Nietzschean terms), "the illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene". This discussion also shows Satre's training in the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. The move away from the dualism of appearance and essence, and appearance and being has its consequences of course, and it is these consequences that Sartre expounds upon briliantly in the rest of the book. One of these, interestingly, is the existence of an infinite series. The dualism of being and appearance is replaced by Sartre with the new dualism of finite and infinite. The appearance is finite, but to be grasped as an appearance of that which appears, says Sartre, it requires the series of appearances as infinite. In addition, Sartre also discusses his reasoning behind his rejection of the idealism of Berkeley. Having reduced reality to the phenomenon, namely that the phenomenon is at is appears, he discusses why the Berkeley move to equate being with appearance is not a tenable one, in spite of the simplicity of such a move. His discussion expands on the famous Husserlian axiom that consciousness is always directed toward something. But Sartre goes beyond Husserl, and this is because he feels he needs to answer those who state that the requirement of consciouusness does not imply that the requirement is satisfied. He takes Husserl's notion of intentionality, and asserts that consciousness of consciousness of something is equated with intentionality, but that the object is what he terms a "revealed-revelation": it reveals itself as already existing when consciousness reveals it. It is very interesting that for students of philosophy, this book is one of the first large treatises they read on philosophy, interesting because the hyphenated definitions that Sartre employs throughout the book can be opaque at times. But Sartre was one of the last "system-builders" of philosophy, and also one of the few philosophers who permitted himself to propagate his philosophy into novels and short stories. One can disagree with his politics, his anti-Americanism, and his Marxism, but he was a brilliant thinker and novelist, and philosophy in the 21st century is definitely experiencing-his-absence......
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Summary: Wading through treacle
Review: Philosophy not being my forte, I found this tough going. I had to give up my original idea of reading it through, and resort to tackling it in 200 page chunks over a period of three months. Even then, I breathed an immense sigh of relief at the end. There are immensely thought-provoking parts, but the sheer density of the prose means that you have to fight your way to get to them. I'm sure I missed out on some good bits due to my eyelids drooping (but do I really care?). Much of the book reads as though Sartre was trying to convince himself rather than his reader - he is not satisfied with making his points once, rather he reiterates themselves over and over again - thou dost protest too much, Jean-Paul. For amateurs (like me) who want to dip their toes into existentialism, I'd recommend "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Camus, or even better "Mrs Premise and Mrs Conclusion visit Jean-Paul Sartre" by the Monty Python team (in which the age-old conundrum of whether one can be free when one has nine instalments to pay on the fridge is finally resolved).
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Summary: A Masterpiece!!!
Review: Sartre is one of the few great intellectuals of our time, a political thinker, novelist, playwright, and philosopher. This, Being and Nothingness is his Magnum Opus. Here he establishes that ultimately human beings are free, but that we evade our freedom by seeing ourselves as mere things or as purely transcendent subjects when in fact we are both and none simultaneously. For Sartre we are what we are not and we are not what we are. We tell ourselves that the person who did such and such a thing two years ago is not "us", that we are different. We tell ourselves that we are more than this physical thing that is our body. (Ex "yes he thought I was ugly, but I'm more than my body".) We think to ourselves I'm not what they think I am. But our freedom is encountered once we realise the totality of what we are. This is more than interesting philosophy; it is a landmark in Western Literature. Other works I like are Paul Omeziri's Descent into Illusions and Heiddeger's Being and Time.
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Summary: Central Philosophical Work of the 20th Century
Review: Sartre is one of those rare philosophers who has broken out of the confines of academic philosophy and spoken to a broader reading public. Regardless of whether one ultimately agrees with his position, there can be little doubt that this is one of the definitive works of the 20th century, standing next to other great works like those of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Deleuze and Derrida. While it is certainly true that Sartre's writing style is difficult, this is a function of the subject matter and philosophical discourse. Readers who exercise a bit of patience will be deeply rewarded. In this respect, the fact that Sartre does break through to a broader reading public is perhaps what accounts for the many negative reader reviews below. Readers of Sartre seem unaware that like any other technical discourse, philosophy too employs a technical language and that part of doing philosophy consists in knowing this language. It's likely that these readers would find later Plato, Aristotle and many other other philosophers just as difficult. Would such readers complain that a text in physics, chemistry or economics is difficult? If not, then why do they complain about the technical language of philosophy? Perhaps, above all, because they desire to understand what the thinker is saying... Seeing that it is relevant to their own lives. Whatever the case may be, techinal language brings clarity and allows us to think things outside the constraints of common sense. It would be impossible to do what Sartre is doing without formulating a style within which to express himself. Readers who complain about style are guilty of laziness, not the author.
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Summary: Being and Nothingness
Review: Sartre's work must be read to be appreciated. Though there is a tendency for Sartre to relish in his own obscurity, there are a few passages which are no less than brilliant, particularly his critique of Freud in the chapter entitled "Bad Faith." The most fundamental questions raised by Sartre's work are those of "freedom" and the problem of free will, which rather than being stated arbitrarily is given as a concrete consequence of the nature and structures of human consciousness. This is a fascinating and extremely misunderstood work; unfortunately Sartre is not taken more seriously in philosophy departments across the United States. However, any serious study of this work will show that Sartre was a first class philosopher whose work is of much more than mere historical or cultural interest. In fact, some of the conclusions Sartre draws within this work are quite disturbing--a novelty in the history of philosophy is the "emotional" import of Sartre's discussion. The analyses in these pages threaten our very sense of self and well-being. Thus, we must refute Sartre, or at least seriously contend with him, lest we never feel comfortable in our own skins. Sartre gives philosophy a human face. There are few others in the history of philosophy who have done the same as effectively and memorably as Sartre. In conclusion, one should take Sartre's early "existential phenomenology" on its own terms. All too often it is codemned because of Sartre's later bizarre brand of Marxism. This is clearly to ignore what is valuable in Sartre's thought.
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