ABSTRACT
The tendency in personal recollections is to exaggerate one's own relationships with an important fellow-especially someone deceased like Gino Germani who cannot readily present his own version of events. Gino well understood and expressed appreciation for the irony of going from one form of authoritarian rule in Italy to another similar variety in Argentina. He had read very widely in the history of sociology. Gino was also instrumental in the University Press of Buenos Aires, started under the guidance of an outstanding figure in his own right, Jose Boris Spivakow, contracting with me to prepare a two-volume anthology in the sociology of knowledge. The practical, organizational tasks that Gino faced in building the Institute of Sociology was, in retrospect, monumental. In a highly charged ideological context, Gino played a Herculean role in introducing an old subject as a new science.
