All the books I've read on data structures so far seem to use C/C++, and make heavy use of the "manual" pointer control that they offer. Since Python hides that sort of memory management and garbage collection from the user is it even possible to implement efficient data structures in this language, and is there any reason to do so instead of using the built-ins?
With Python you have access to a vast assortment of library modules written and debugged by other people.  Odds are very good that somewhere out there, there is a module that does at least part of what you want, and odds are even good that it might be implemented in C for performance.
For example, if you need to do matrix math, you can use NumPy, which was written in C and Fortran.
Python is slow enough that you won't be happy if you try to write some sort of really compute-intensive code (example, a Fast Fourier Transform) in native Python.  On the other hand, you can get a C-coded Fourier Transform as part of SciPy, and just use it.
I have never had a situation where I wanted to solve a problem in Python and said "darn, I just can't express the data structure I need."
If you are a pioneer, and you are doing something in Python for which there just isn't any library module out there, then you can try writing it in pure Python.  If it is fast enough, you are done.  If it is too slow, you can profile it, figure out where the slow parts are, and rewrite them in C using the Python C API.  I have never needed to do this yet.
Data Structures in Python