The Last Secrets

Subtitled 'The Final Mysteries of Exploration', The Last Secrets contains eight accounts of recently achieved feats of exploration.
CONTENTS
Preface
I Lhasa
II The Gorges of the Brahmaputra
III The North Pole
IV The Mountains of the Moon
V The South Pole
VI Mount McKinley
VII The Holy Cities of Islam
VIII The Exploration of New Guinea
IX Mount Everest
Bio
John Buchan (August 1875 - 11 February 1940) was a British novelist, historian, and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation.
After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began his writing career and his political and diplomatic careers, serving as a private secretary to the administrator of various colonies in southern Africa. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort during the First World War. He was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities in 1927, but he spent most of his time on his writing career, notably writing The Thirty-Nine Steps and other adventure fiction.
In 1935, King George V, on the advice of Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, appointed Buchan to replace the Earl of Bessborough as Governor General of Canada, for which purpose Buchan was raised to the peerage. He occupied the post until his death in 1940.
Buchan was enthusiastic about literacy and the development of Canadian culture, and he received a state funeral in Canada before his ashes were returned to the United Kingdom.
Buchan's 100 works include nearly 30 novels, seven collections of short stories, and biographies of Sir Walter Scott, Caesar Augustus, and Oliver Cromwell. He was awarded the 1928 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography of the Marquess of Montrose, but the most famous of his books were the spy thrillers, and it is for these that he is now best remembered. The "last Buchan" (as Graham Greene entitled his appreciative review) was the 1941 novel Sick Heart River (American title: Mountain Meadow), in which a dying protagonist confronts the questions of the meaning of life in the Canadian wilderness. (wikipedia.org)

John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875, the son of the Reverend John Buchan, a Presbyterian clergyman, and his wife Helen Masterton, the daughter of a sheep farmer. He read classics at the universities of Glasgow and Oxord before embarking on a career spanning the London bar, the Fleet Street press, the northern and southern hemispheres of the British Empire, the Houses of Parliament, and the long wooden shelves of literature. Best known today for his adventure stories, and in particular The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Alfred Hitchcock brought to the cinema in 1935, he was a stakhanovite of English letters, penning dozens of novels and historical works in all. He died in Montreal in 1940.