Joan Acocella has been writing about dance for more than 25 years and has been critiquing for the New Yorker since 1998, where she also writes about books. Her new collection, “Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints” (Pantheon, 520 pages, $30), contains none of her dance reviews, but instead anthologizes her reviews of books about dance and literary figures, her overviews of the oeuvre of several contemporary novelists, as well as essays on Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc.

This collection contains less of a distinction between Ms. Acocella’s writing on dance versus literature than between her treatment of live notables and dead ones. She’s able to respond to the work of deceased or distant authors with judicious detachment, but when profiling a proximate, living icon she seems too eager to please her subject. This is particularly true of dancers. Her profiles of Suzanne Farrell and Mikhail Baryshnikov are based primarily on conversations with the subjects. They read as “authorized” profiles that perpetuate a reductive dogma laid down by Arlene Croce, who was Ms. Acocella’s predecessor as dance critic at the New Yorker from 1973 until 1998. In Ms. Croce’s and Ms. Acocella’s work, we are sometimes confronted with statements of praise or dismissal that could be enjoyed if qualified as pure subjectivity but become problematic when the authors use them to simplify the historical record. Writing about Ms. Farrell and Mr. Baryshnikov in 1986, Ms. Croce went so far as to state that “Dancing .. .. is the great theatre art we in America know today largely because of their contributions to it.”

Ms. Acocella has also written about psychiatry, and in most of her literary discussions cogently draws the intersecting vectors of psyche and creativity. But she either misses or chooses to overlook red flags that leap out from the chapter on Ms. Farrell, which was originally published in 2003. The ballerina was 9 years old when her parents separated; Ms. Acocella writes that Ms. Farrell “didn’t mind much,” because, the ballerina claims, “it was good not to hear their fights any more.”

To begin with, any 9-year-old would miss the presence of a father. Second, her parents’ fights must have been pretty terrible for her to be glad that her parents were separating. And third, and most important, her parents’ breakup (Ms. Farrell in her autobiography says that she rarely saw her father after this) had great relevance for her future career, since George Balanchine, who ensconced her as New York City Ballet’s prima ballerina when she only 19, was attracted again and again to female dancers with father issues. Ms. Farrell’s relationship with Balanchine bore all the earmarks of unfinished business with her own father.

Ms. Acocella evinces no interest in connecting these dots. She does, however, manage to be quite evenhanded in describing Ms. Farrell’s 1993 dismissal from the New York City Ballet, where she was working as a coach after her last performance there in 1989. She quotes the crossfire of accusations between Ms. Farrell and Peter Martins, the dance company’s artistic director. One one can easily imagine each adversary doing exactly what the other one had claimed. But it’s also rather rich of Ms. Acocella not to mention the fact that it was an article in her own publication that in all likelihood played a decisive role in Ms. Farrell’s dismissal. In May 1993, the late David Daniel, a dance critic and Croce ally, wrote a New Yorker piece lamenting that Ms. Farrell’s coaching skills were not being employed more actively by the company. He included quotes testifying to her greatness from what seemed like as many dance luminaries as he could rustle up. NYCB fired Ms. Farrell almost immediately after the article came out.

Today Ms. Acocella’s 2003 profile reads like a sequel to Daniel’s polemical tribute of a decade earlier.

In Ms. Acocella’s profile of Mr. Baryshnikov, for which she accompanied him on a trip to his native Latvia, every controversial situation in the dancer’s life becomes turned to Mr. Baryshikov’s advantage, and every sour note in his personality is sweetened. At times, Ms. Acocella seems to be colluding with Mr. Baryshnikov in his aggressive deflecting, rebutting, and stonewalling of her own pro forma attempts at psychological probing. Reading this profile, one cannot imagine Ms. Acocella posing a single follow-up question to the superstar.

Ms. Acocella is considerably more balanced and insightful in her reviews of books written about other towering figures in dance. One of the book’s best essays is about Vaslav Nijinsky, motivated in part by the publication of Peter Ostwald’s “Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness” (1991). Although Nijinsky has been a career-long subject for Ms. Acocella, she recognizes Mr. Ostwald’s indefatigable research and commends perceptions on his part that don’t resort to facile diagnoses. Reviewing biographies of Jerome Robbins, Frederick Ashton, and Bob Fosse, she’s a bit too intent on providing airtight encapsulations of what their work meant, but she’s also able to accurately graph many of the essential coordinates of their personalities and their art.

One of the most entertaining essays is her review of Twyla Tharp’s 1992 autobiography, on which she heaps a scorn that is not entirely deserved, registering instead as some degree of belated recognition of Ms. Tharp’s opportunism, to which both Ms. Acocella (as well as Ms. Croce) seemed to have remained largely impervious up to that point. Ms. Tharp’s autobiography is fascinating and repulsive, a confessional in which she lays out even more of her disturbances than she probably intended to do. By 1992, however, Ms. Tharp’s behavior and the blatent crassness that was now visible in her work were turning off even many of her most fervent admirers. Ms. Acocella’s passionate sarcasm in this essay makes for a great read.

jlobenthal@nysun.com