The years immediately following Balanchine’s death in 1983 saw a dearth of apparent successors within ballet itself. As a result, many thought modern dance choreographers would save the balletic genre.

In “Howling Near Heaven: Twyla Tharp and the Re-Invention of Modern Dance” (St. Martin’s Press, 326 pages, $25.95) the longtime dance critic and scholar Marcia Siegel writes that Twyla Tharp “saw herself, as did many critics, as the only successor to Balanchine.” This belief has always puzzled me, but Ms. Siegel apparently agrees. Her great admiration for her subject forms the departure point of “Howling Near Heaven.”

In part, the belief in Ms. Tharp as successor is based on her breakthrough work, “Push Comes to Shove,” starring Mikhail Baryshnikov. Premiered at American Ballet Theatre in 1976, it remains the most successful work Ms. Tharp ever made for a ballet company or using ballet dancers. Twelve years later, after more works for ABT as well as New York City Ballet, Mr. Baryshnikov, then ABT’s artistic director, named Ms. Tharp artistic associate.

The results were not happy. As Ms. Siegel reports, “Baryshnikov gave her carte blanche” and “the effort cost a fortune …” Mr. Baryshnikov’s resignation as ABT’s artistic director in 1989 was, I believe, partly in response to the ABT board’s anger over his enabling of Ms.Tharp’s profligacy. At an ABT gala the next year, Ms. Tharp herself danced Mr. Baryshnikov’s role in the finale of “Push Comes to Shove.” Ms. Siegel asks rhetorically, and rather coyly: “Was she modeling herself as a candidate for the real-life role of artistic director?” There is no question, even adduced solely from the evidence Ms. Siegel has presented here, that that was indeed what Ms. Tharp wanted, but an enormous repertory institution like ABT could not cater to her and survive on its own terms.

The defeat of Ms. Tharp’s ambition to run a ballet company was a serious blow for her, and in the early 1990s she made some ill-advised career moves. In the fall of 1992, Ms. Tharp published her autobiography, including a description of her brief sexual involvement with Mr. Baryshnikov – among the last things he wanted to read, I imagine, following Gelsey Kirkland’s similar revelations in her 1986 memoir “Dancing on My Grave.” The timing could not have been worse: Ms. Tharp and Mr. Baryshnikov were slated just a few months later to begin a cross-country tour together to perform her new work. Mr. Baryshnikov told Ms. Siegel that during the tour he told Ms. Tharp frankly that the work she had made for it was substandard. The apparent result is a lasting breach in their relationship.

Ms. Tharp is an enormously successful artist who has shot herself in the foot more than once. Ms. Siegel notes that despite Ms. Tharp’s desire to see her work performed by companies all over the world, she “gradually priced herself out of the market.” Yet Ms. Tharp’s powers of resiliency and renewal are remarkable. Among her many projects in the 1990s, she returned on a freelance basis to ABT and NYCB to make new works. In 2002, as both the director and the choreographer of “Movin’ Out,” she achieved her greatest popular success, fulfilling her long-frustrated dream of creating a hit Broadway show.

Ms. Siegel’s book contains little information about Ms. Tharp’s childhood or education, but what she does provide is intriguing. Her early years in California certainly contributed to her choreographic style. As a teenager, Ms. Tharp participated in an astounding array of extracurricular activities, from violin practice to ballet and tap dance and even baton twirling; she also worked weekends at the drive-in movie theater that her parents owned. When her style jelled conclusively during the 1970s, it blended the strong and percussively locomotive legwork of classic modern dance with elements from social dancing, popular entertainment, and a kind of shambling, let-it-all-hang-out looseness that owed something to the abandon of rock dances.

In “Howling Near Heaven,” Ms. Siegel succeeds in painstakingly sorting out the diverse strands of Ms. Tharp’s prolific career. She supplies detailed descriptions of the works that are also frequently evaluative as well. But sometimes she chooses not to weigh in on aesthetic topics about which I would have welcomed comments from her. What, for example, does Ms. Siegel think about Ms. Tharp’s use of pointe work, a subject that has certainly sparked widely divergent responses from critics? I had the feeling Ms. Siegel would have preferred to write a purely critical biography, sticking to an analysis of Ms. Tharp’s choreography itself, rather than an ostensibly full-scale biography, but, ultimately, she knew that no trade publisher today was likely to publish an exegesis rather than a life story.

Ms. Siegel writes in her acknowledgments that this is not an “authorized” biography, but that the book nevertheless “could not have been written” without Ms. Tharp’s cooperation. Ms. Siegel conducts her inquiry with honesty and integrity. However, rather than attempting to deny Ms. Tharp’s vagaries, she chooses to retain a polite distance from them. Ms. Siegel frequently skims over, or describes in the most matter-of-fact terms, crises, intimate relationships, and emotional traumas in Ms. Tharp’s life. As a result, her book has the genteel recalcitrance of an old New Yorker magazine profile and could easily have delved deeper: Ms. Tharp’s life and personality are as interesting as her work.