Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor and cultural critic, has been so prolific as a writer that the idea of fitting his essential works into a single volume of a manageable size seems preposterous. It has been done, however, in the recently published "The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader." The Gates reader contains his favorite stories which revolve around love of family, present and past. Those memories had ignited one of his life's central passions, genealogy--the search for roots--his and other people's. In the first season, he traced the origins of such celebrities as Wanda Sykes, Martha Stewart, John Legend, Harry Connick Jr., Margaret Cho, Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. Gates would especially like for "everybody in the race" to do his or her family tree, because he believes that knowing one's ancestry untaps powerful forces for healing the deep wounds of racism in America. "One way for America to move on is to address the complexity of race, and the best way to do that is through genealogy and genetics," he says.