I have finally had some success! I wrote a test sketch that wrote to buffer 1 and then read buffer 1 without ever transferring it to the a page. This failed which lead me to believe that it was a wiring issue. I used the voltmeter and did find a jumper on my break out board which I corrected. This still did not correct the issue though. Then I found that my UNO has 2 GND pins and one of them only gets very intermittent connectivity. So I moved the GND jumper wire over to the second GND socket and everything started to work. I can write to the buffer, write the buffer to a page and then read it all back properly now.
However I do still have an issue. This setup is using an UNO but my final application is an SMT application and I had the PCB's made already. The chip select pin is typically pin 10 but I used pin 9. I figured it would be easy enough to change the pin in the CPP file for the library. So I made the following change to the CPP file and I moved the Chip Select jumper from UNO pin 10 to pin 9.
#define SLAVESELECT 9//ss pin assignment was 10 and I change to 9.
As soon as I recompile the sketch and try to run it on the UNO with no other changes the initial while loop that tries to write to the buffer hangs. As soon as I change the SLAVESELECT back to pin 10 (and move the CS jumper wire) it works perfectly again. Is there someplace else I should be looking to change the pin assignment?