The Breaking Point is a collection of eight short stories by Daphne du Maurier first published in 1959 by Victor Gollancz in the UK and Doubleday in the US. It has also been published under the title The Blue Lenses and Other Stories. The stories were written at a time when du Maurier herself came close to a severe nervous breakdown and reflect her own psychological stress. Du Maurier herself acknowledged she had come close to madness immediately before she wrote them; and they were part of her cure – "the means by which she wrote herself back to sanity". The original book had illustrations before each story by Margot Tomes.

Stories

Breaking point or The Breaking Point may refer to:

Psychology

Books

Film and TV

Film

Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876 – September 22, 1958) was an American writer, often called the American Agatha Christie, although her first mystery novel was published 14 years before Christie's first novel in 1922.

Rinehart is considered the source of the phrase "The butler did it" from her novel The Door (1930), although the novel does not use the exact phrase. Rinehart is also considered to have invented the "Had-I-But-Known" school of mystery writing, with the publication of The Circular Staircase (1908).

She also created a costumed super-criminal called "the Bat", cited by Bob Kane as one of the inspirations for his "Batman".

Biography

Mary Roberts Rinehart was born Mary Ella Roberts in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, now a part of Pittsburgh. Her father was a frustrated inventor, and throughout her childhood, the family often had financial problems. Left-handed at a time when that was considered inappropriate, she was trained to use her right hand instead.

She attended public schools and graduated at age 16, then enrolled at the Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses at Pittsburgh Homeopathic Hospital, where she graduated in 1896. She described the experience as "all the tragedy of the world under one roof." After graduation, she married Stanley Marshall Rinehart (1867–1932), a physician she had met there. They had three sons and one daughter: Stanley Jr., Frederick, Alan, and Elizabeth Glory.

HBO's Band of Brothers, a ten-part television World War II miniseries based on the book of the same title written by historian and biographer Stephen Ambrose, was executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks after their collaboration on the World War II film Saving Private Ryan (1998). The episodes first aired in 2001 on HBO and are still run frequently on various TV networks around the world.

The narrative centers on the experiences of E ("Easy") Company of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment assigned to the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army. The series covers Easy's basic training at Toccoa, Georgia, the American airborne landings in Normandy, Operation Market Garden, the Battle of Bastogne and on to the end of the war.

The events portrayed are based on Ambrose's research and recorded interviews with Easy Company veterans. A large amount of literary license was taken with the episodes, and other reference books will highlight the differences between recorded history and the film version. All of the characters portrayed are based on actual members of Easy Company; some of them can be seen in prerecorded interviews as a prelude to each episode (their identities, however, are not revealed until the final episode, although throughout the series, the men refer to each other by nicknames or their last names). Spielberg and Hanks produced a sequel miniseries called The Pacific that premiered in March 2010.